This article deals with the contradiction which became prominent with new market requirements for more flexibility and qualified products, on the one hand, and increased automatisation and informatisation of production and work processes, on the other. The new situation forces companies, especially small batch production, machine factories with their still qualified work and organisation, to build up more flexibility to stabilize and reinforce their market power. But their very technical answer shows that this management-strategy can, and in many cases will, lead to the opposite: growing inflexibility. Regarding this problem from a political-theoretical perspective and less from an economic-emperical one, the extending technical autonomy of the production process makes feasible extensive technical control by management over the working process and over the workers, too. But unlimited use of technical control by the computer-systems will not lead to more flexibility, on the contrary it hinders it and in addition to this it will be confronted with a barrier of productive innovation coming from the shop floor. Considering this, the author ventures the thesis that: as long as human work is needed in production processes, self regulation and control can be taken out of the qualification of the workers and be moved out of the organisation only at the risk of inflexibility and at the price of loss of social productivity and innovation. In order to prevent this, more care must be taken by using and designing technology for the interfaces between man-machine-system: differentiate the differences among them and do not mix or even convert them. A productive system also controlled by the workers who work in and with the system, and not only by management, shows that the question of more flexibility, productivity and innovation is tightly woven with the internal power structure in the organisation.