Industry 4 (I4) was a revolutionary new stage for technological progress in manufacturing which promised a new level of interconnectedness between a diverse range of technologies. Sensors, as a point technology, play an important role in these developments, facilitating human–machine interaction and enabling data collection for system-level technologies. Concerns for human labour working in I4 environments (e.g., health and safety, data generation and extraction) are acknowledged by Industry 5 (I5), an update of I4 which promises greater attention to human–machine relations through a values-driven approach to collaboration and co-design. This article explores how engineering experts integrate values promoted by policy-makers into both their thinking about the human in their work and in their writing. This paper demonstrates a novel interdisciplinary approach in which an awareness of different disciplinary epistemic values associated with humans and work guides a systematic literature review and interpretive coding of practice-focussed engineering papers. Findings demonstrate evidence of an I5 human-centric approach: a high value for employees as “end-users” of innovative systems in manufacturing; and an increase in output addressing human activity in modelling and the technologies available to address this concern. However, epistemic publishing practices show that efforts to increase the effectiveness of manufacturing systems often neglect worker voice.

Der Staat als Arbeitgeber hat in den letzten Jahren zunehmend seine in der ‚goldenen Ära des Wohlfahrtsstaates‘ (etwa 1960-1980) entwickelte Rolle als vorbildlicher Arbeitgeber aufgegeben. Im Zuge effizienzorientierter Re-Regulierung und politischer Dezentralisierung nähern sich die Arbeits- und Beschäftigungsbedingungen im deutschen öffentlichen Sektor den Verhältnissen in der Privatwirtschaft an. Damit einher geht eine über die traditionelle Statusgruppendifferenzierung hinausgehende Fragmentierung der Beschäftigtengruppen der öffentlichen Dienste. Zugleich werden die über lange Zeit kooperativ-konsensuellen Beziehungen zwischen Arbeitnehmer- und Arbeitgeberseite heterogener und konflikthafter. In diesem Prozess, so unsere These, Ländern Gewerkschaften wie Berufsverbände ihre arbeits- und professionspolitischen Strategien und besetzen neue Felder in der betrieblichen, politischen und öffentlichen Arena.

This article discusses new technologies in regard to their potential to capture workers’ situated knowledge. Machines are said to substitute but also to contribute to the labour process in collaboration with human skill sets. ‘Industry 4.0’ became the policy-wide shorthand to describe the new quality of real-time interconnectedness and feedback loops, known as cyber-physical systems within industry and engineering sciences. Data flows generated in these systems are used to continuously improve work processes by extracting information down to the very micro-level of neuroergonomics. In this process, workers’ interactions with the system are extracted, fed back and processed for future use and improvement. The article argues that in addition to the potential for extraction of new (bodily) knowledge, shifting skill use and the potential for new forms of control, new technologies contain the potential to extract situated knowledge owned by the worker and crucial for resistance and collective struggles.

In the context of innovation in and the application of information and communication technology (ICT), this article seeks to understand how ICT-enabled tools, including algorithmic processing interfaces, cloud computing software, QR codes and barcodes, have become a new managerial equipment for organising, controlling, and disciplining the labour force in the warehouses of e-commerce enterprises in India. This article engages with labour process theory which accords analytical importance to technology in organising work, for managerial control and disciplinary regimes in furtherance of capital accumulation. The evidence here derives from four month’s field work in 2022–23 from Bangalore in south India. Data were generated from 74 semi-structured interviews with employees of, principally, Amazon and Flipkart. The major findings are that an integrated, digitised control system operating in tandem with direct human supervision, ensures the simultaneous processing of products orders and the monitoring of workers’ performance. Further, it investigates how they contribute to work intensification and exacerbated job-related insecurities and vulnerabilities. The outcome is extreme work intensity and the creation of new forms of worker insecurity and vulnerability.