Kirstie is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication, Université de Montréal. Her research interests focus on deepening our understanding of how organisational members who do not interact regularly construct the meaning of their work, often in different ways. She is particularly interested in the experiences and organisational and occupational identities of persons who occupy hybrid public-private spaces, such as volunteers or workers who are employed and managed by an organisation yet work with aged persons in home-based care environments. She aims to show how the multiple meanings given to work and organisational experiences more generally can be mobilised as a resource for individuals who occupy a peripheral organisational position.
She also investigates how communicative processes, which create particular types of collective behaviour, can facilitate and constrain organisational participation. In particular, her research examines how discourses about professionalism combine with organisational control and coordination mechanisms to structure relationality in particular ways, often with the aim of increasing collaboration, and frequently minimising or suppressing dissent. To do so, she analyses how organisational members construct communities of practice by negotiating what ways of knowing and doing should be used to resolve organisational problems and what constitutes appropriate forms of interaction.