2019/07 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
Control in the era of surveillance capitalism: an empirical investigation of Italian Industry 4.0 factories |
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Angelo Moro, Matteo Rinaldini, Jacopo Staccioli and Maria Enrica Virgillito |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
Industry 4.0; Organisational Change; Control; Saturation of Working Time.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
L23, L6, M54, O33
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
We explore the extent to which the current technological
trend, dubbed Industry 4.0, might increase forms of control inside
organisations, by focussing on pivotal firms in the so-called Italian
Motor Valley currently embracing its adoption. We find that Industry 4.0
technologies open up great possibilities for incorporating the three
forms of control identified by Orlikowski (1991), i.e. personal,
bureaucratic, and social, into technological artefacts, often blending
them together. If, on the one hand, this implies a technical and
theoretical feasibility of enforcing forms of 'Big Brother' surveillance
within the boundaries of organisations, and hereby of the workplace, on
the other hand, the actual achievement of these possibilities depends on
the organisational environment within which the new technologies are
implemented.
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