Smart manufacturing and tasks automation in the steel industry: Reflecting on routine work and skills in Industry 4.0

Luca Antonazzo, Dean Stroud and Martin Weinel
Additional contact information
Luca Antonazzo: Centre for Workplace Research (CWER), Prague University of Economics and Business, Czechia
Martin Weinel: School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2024, vol. 45, issue 3, 914-936

Abstract: This article presents the findings of research on the European steel industry as it transitions toward Industry 4.0. Drawing on data generated through semi-structured interviews, the authors reflect on the distinction between routine and non-routine work which has informed much recent research on technology effects on jobs. First, they propose to distinguish between ‘deterministic’ and ‘probabilistic’ technological approaches, the latter illustrative of the Industry 4.0 model and characterised by the use of algorithms and statistical learning. Next, the authors maintain that jobs that have been labelled as ‘routine’ may entail a range of tasks that Industry 4.0 technologies remain unable to entirely automatise, which has led to broadening skillsets and a prominence acquired by transversal skills. Hence, the authors suggest overcoming the routine/non-routine dichotomy and deterministic assumptions on workers’ substitution in favour of a continuum-based conceptualisation of tasks and a more nuanced investigation of technology effects.

Keywords: Digitalisation; Industry 4.0; routine work; skills and training; steel industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X231201002 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:45:y:2024:i:3:p:914-936

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X231201002

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().