Abstract
The aim of this paper is to reassess the current view of technological trends adopting a historical perspective. In our interpretation, the historical record provides some suggestive evidence for a more sceptical view of the notion of an emerging “fourth” industrial revolution. Indeed, even at an impressionistic glance, the recent developments in AI, communication and robotics that are marked as the core of the fourth industrial revolution, appear as a rather natural prolongation of the ICT macro-trajectories described in this paper. At the same time, to study the relation between technology and labour, we focus on the plant level as the most useful unit of analysis to consider the complex interaction between management systems, labour process and technological innovations. In this sense, we examine two Internet of Things’ technologies in order to underline the persistence of a fundamental trait of the capitalist mode of production, namely the exertion of control over workers. Consistently, we expect a continuity between newly emerging management practices and previous management systems, especially referring to the ones adopted during the ICT revolution.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
05 February 2020
Unfortunately, the first sentence of the second paragraph under the heading ���Technology and labour��� was published wrongly as below.
Notes
As recalled in Knights and Willmott (1990, p.6), Marx pointed out this issue very clearly: “As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function arising from the nature of the social labour process, and peculiar to that process, but is at the same time a function of the exploitation of a social labour process, and is consequently conditioned by the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the raw materials of his exploitation” (Marx 1976, p. 449).
Interesting insights on this point were provided by Pardi (2018) during the conference “A new industrial revolution? Labour, technology and the automotive industry” at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna on 31 May 2018.
For instance, the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute certified in 2007 an intense use of computer monitoring by employers to increase productivity and lower cases of litigation (http://www.plattgroupllc.com/jun08/2007ElectronicMonitoringSurveillanceSurvey.pdf).
References
Adler, P. (1995). ‘Democratic Taylorism’: The Toyota production system at NUMMI. In Babson S. (Ed.) Lean work: Empowerment and exploitation in the global auto industry (pp. 207–219). Wayne State University Press, Detroit.
Aglietta, M. (2000). A theory of capitalist regulation: The US experience. New York: Verso Books.
Allen, R. (2017). Lesson from history for the future of work. Nature,550, 321–324.
Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2016). The risk of automation for jobs in OECD countries: A comparative analysis. OECD social, employment and migration working papers, No. 189. Paris: OECD Publishing.
Baccaro, L., & Howell, C. (2017). Trajectories of neoliberal transformation: European industrial relations since the 1970s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bessen, J. (2015). Learning by doing. The real connection between innovation, wages and wealth. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bonazzi, G. (2007). Storia del pensiero organizzativo. Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The second machine age. New York: W. Norton.
Burawoy, M. (1982). Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ciocchetti, C. A. (2011). The eavesdropping employer: a twenty-first century framework for employee monitoring. American Business Law Journal,48(2), 285–369.
Cirillo, V., Rinaldini, M., Staccioli, J., & Virgillito, M. E. (2018). Workers’ awareness context in Italian 4.0 factories. GLO Discussion Paper, No. 240.
Clark, G. (2007). A farewell to alms. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Coriat, B. (1991). Penser à l’envers. Paris: Ch. Bourgois.
Da Xu, L., He, W., & Li, S. (2014). Internet of things in industries: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics,10(4), 2233–2243.
De Stefano, V. (2015). The rise of the just-in-time workforce: On-demand work, crowdwork, and labor protection in the gig-economy. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal,37, 471.
Dosi, G. (1982). Technological paradigms and technological trajectories: a suggested interpretation of the determinants and directions of technical change. Research Policy,11(3), 147–162.
Dosi, G., & Virgillito, M. E. (2019). Whither the evolution of the contemporary social fabric? new technologies and old socio-economic trends. Technical report. GLO Discussion Paper.
Edwards, R. (1982). Contested terrain: The transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. Science and Society,46(2), 237–240.
Fitbit. (2019). The impact of diabetes on the workplace. https://2nwchq3a3ags2kj7bq20e3qv-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/Impact-Diabetes-Workplace-WP-1.pdf. Accessed 9 Aug 2019.
Florida, R., & Kenney, M. (1991). Transplanted organizations: The transfer of Japanese industrial organization to the us. American Sociological Review, 56(3), 381–398.
Freeman, C., & Louca, F. (2001). As time goes by: From the industrial revolutions to the information revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, C., & Soete, L. (1990). Fast structural change and slow productivity change: some paradoxes in the economics of information technology. Structural change and economic dynamics,1, 225–242.
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. (2013). The future of employment. Working Paper Oxford Martin School. http://sep4u.gr/wpcontent/uploads/The_Future_of_Employment_ox_2013.pdf. Accessed 9 Aug 2019.
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change,114, 254–280.
Gaddi, M. (2018). Industria 4.0 e il lavoro. Una ricerca nelle fabbriche del Veneto. Milano: Edizioni Punto Rosso.
Gordon, R. (2016). The rise and fall of American growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Harrison, B. (1997). Lean and mean: The changing landscape of corporate power in the age of flexibility. New York: Guilford Press.
Kern, H., & Schumann, M. (1987). Limits of the division of labour, new production and employment concepts in West German industry. Economic and Industrial Democracy,8(2), 151–170.
Knights, D., & Willmott, H. (1990). Labour process theory. London: MacMillan Press Ltd.
Kumar, P., Reinitz, H., Simunovic, J., Sandeep, K., & Franzon, P. (2009). Overview of rfid technology and its applications in the food industry. Journal of Food Science,74(8), R101–R106.
Lutz, B. (1992). The contradictions of post-tayloristic rationalization and the uncertain future of industrial work. Technology and Work in German Industry (pp. 26–45). London: Routledge and Keagan.
Manske, F. (1990). The end of taylorism or its transformation? From spot control to systemic control of the production process. International Journal of Political Economy,20(4), 61–78.
Marglin, S. A. (1974). What do bosses do? The origins and functions of hierarchy in capitalist production. Review of radical political economics,6(2), 60–112.
Martinelli, A., Mina, A., & Moggi, M. (2019). The enabling technologies of industry 4.0: Examining the seeds of the fourth industrial revolution (No. 2019/09). Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant’ Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. 1). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Moore, P., Piwek, L., & Roper, I. (2018). The quantified workplace: A study in self-tracking, agility and change management. Self-tracking (pp. 93–110). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moore, P., & Robinson, A. (2016). The quantified self: What counts in the neoliberal workplace. New Media & Society,18(11), 2774–2792.
Musso, S. (2013). Labor in the third industrial revolution: A tentative synthesis. In G. Dosi & L. Galambos (Eds.), The third industrial revolution in global business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noble, D. F. (1978). Social choice in machine design: The case of automatically controlled machine tools, and a challenge for labor. Politics & Society,8(3-4), 313–347.
Noble, D. (2017). Forces of production: A social history of industrial automation. Abington: Routledge.
Nuvolari, A. (2019). Understanding successive industrial revolutions: a “development block” approach. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 32, 33–44.
OECD. (1994). The OECD jobs study: Facts, analysis and strategies. Paris: OECD Publications.
OECD. (2019). OECD employment outlook 2019. Paris: OECD Publications.
Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota production system: Beyond large-scale production. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Pagnattaro, M. A. (2008). Getting under your skin – literally: RFID in the employment context. Journal of Law, Technology & Policy, 2, 237–257.
Pardi, T. (2018). “Industry 4.0”: hypes, stakes, history and possible consequences for workers in the automotive sector, presentation at the conference “A new industrial revolution? Labour, technology and the automotive industry”, 31 May 2018, Pisa.
Piva, M., & Vivarelli, M. (2018). Innovation, jobs, skills and tasks: a multifaceted relationship. Giornale di diritto del lavoro e di relazioni industriali.
Pollard, S. (1963). Factory discipline in the industrial revolution. Economic History Review, 16(2), 254–271.
Schatsky, D. & Kumar, N. (2018). Workforce superpowers: Wearables are augmenting employees’ abilities. Deloitte Insights. https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/signals-for-strategists/wearable-devices-in-the-workplace.html. Accessed 9 Aug 2019.
Schwab, K. (2016). The fourth industrial revolution. Geneve: World Economic Forum.
Seneviratne, S., Hu, Y., Nguyen, T., Lan, G., Khalifa, S., Thilakarathna, K., et al. (2017). A survey of wearable devices and challenges. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials,19(4), 2573–2620.
Streeck, W., & Thelen, K. A. (2005). Beyond continuity: Institutional change in advanced political economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Summers, L. (2014). US Economic prospects: secular stagnation, hysteresis, and the zero-lower bound. Business Economics,49, 65–73.
Womack, J. P., Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T., & Roos, D. (1990). Machine that changed the world. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Zollo, M., & Winter, S. G. (2002). Deliberate learning and the evolution of dynamic capabilities. Organization Science,13(3), 339–351.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge support from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 822781 GROWINPRO—Growth Welfare Innovation Productivity.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cetrulo, A., Nuvolari, A. Industry 4.0: revolution or hype? Reassessing recent technological trends and their impact on labour. J. Ind. Bus. Econ. 46, 391–402 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40812-019-00132-y
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40812-019-00132-y