Impact of Technology on Work: Technical Functionalities that Give Rise to New Job Designs in Industry 4.0

Abstract

With rapid advancements in the application of Industry 4.0 technologies throughout industries, a collection of different views on its potential implications for workers are emerging. Various authors agree that these technologies and their application in manufacturing systems is structurally different compared to current methods of production. Consequently, it is expected that the impact on manufacturing jobs, specifically on the tasks, is profoundly different from what we already know from literature. However, authors often borrow from existing literature to describe changes in work, and are not explicit on how and why Industry 4.0 and the implications is conceptually different. Until now, little research has focused on defining the technical functionalities that give rise to new job designs. This paper therefore focuses on synthesizing the diverging views on the effect of Industry 4.0 on employees’ jobs and specifically aims to understand how the technical changes of the transformation towards a Cyber Physical System in production relate to changes in job design. The central question this paper addresses is: How do the technical changes of the transformation towards a Cyber Physical System impact job design in industrial production? The contribution is an overview of the technical functionalities of Cyber-Physical Systems that are conjectured to change direct and indirect value-adding jobs in industrial production. This model will be used as a basis for further empirical inquiries. Moreover, it provides central points of interests for organizations involved with the design and implementation of Industry 4.0, focusing on job design.