Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Industry 4.0 features a cluster of diverse technologies. Implementing these in the enterprise will require a considerable amount of participation. Current forms of participatory design (Agile methods, design thinking, open innovation) more closely involve customers, but not generally the company’s own production workers. We investigate if and how the production engineers who will implement Industry 4.0 want to involve their colleagues on the shop floor. We present results of qualitative interviews, a quantitative survey and Q-sorts conducted with around 230 engineering employees of an automotive plant. Participating engineers were invited to express their viewpoints, experiences and visions on how production workers could be involved in the implementation of Industry 4.0. On the one hand, the data suggest positive attitudes towards, and experiences of participation. On the other hand, participation is demanding: respondents report a lack of time and opportunities. It may require more imagination and initiative to break through existing formal processes often restricted to “catch-up” improvements.

As an introduction to this monographic issue, this article reviews the ‘state of the art’ about the effects of the digitalization and robotization processes on the future of work and employment. A critical review of two dominant approaches on whether a future massive technological unemployment will emerge or if, on the contrary, there will be a displacement of workforce to new jobs with digital tasks and qualifications, with winners and losers of digitalization. A first approach is named replacement digitalization, which predicts the inevitability of massive technological unemployment due to disruptions of new digital technologies (and Industry 4.0) in labor and work processes, which will eliminate multiple occupations and their jobs because their automation. A second alternative approach will be named as task digitalization, defending that digitalization does not eliminate complete occupations but rather specific tasks of jobs, pushing the elimination of some jobs and the creation of new jobs that will increase the global employment figures. It will be emphasized that both perspectives coincide in the appearance of losers and winners of digitalization, with a need to intervene in the training and lifelong learning structures for the human factor. Finally, a technological design strategy named integration digitalization will be considered, considering Industry 4.0 as an opportunity to reinforce the collaborative use of new digital technologies with the reskilling of human factor.

In recent decades, the spread of digitalization has transformed the processes of political participation and citizen mobilization in diverse and unexpected ways. Contrary to what was initially expected, the consequences of the technologization of the political field have been very complex. The greatest innovations have taken place in the space of unconventional political participation, through a set of technologically mediated interventions full of light and shadows. This article offers a sample of some of the emerging digital political practices that have appeared in recent years. The objective is not to position oneself in a debate about diagnoses or moral evaluations but to map the digital tools for political participation without falling into a techno-deterministic, conciliatory or celebratory perspective. Rather, it aims to analyze different intervention models, both successful and unsuccessful, placing them in their historical context and assessing their strengths and weaknesses.

Economic globalization and the rise of transnational corporate have created a favorable climate for corporate human abusers, which are governed principally by codes of supply and demand and show loyalty only to their stockholders. This phenomenon is one of the most important challenges for a labor framework articulated around Nation-State, supporting a growing asymmetry of power between transnationals corporations and the States. Although on 26 June 2014, the Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 26/9 to elaborate an internationally legal binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnationals corporations and other business enterprises, this instrument has not been yet approved. This articles focuses in the effects on the enactment of the binding agreement and subsidiary paper adopted by Global Framework Agreements on the achievement of Decent Work in global supply chains.

ILO, EU, States and social partners can establish rules for an economic sphere that is deregulated or has significant gaps in regulation: digitalization and the platform economy. There is no strictly defined workplace, but there are people who produce within the scope of an organization that places its product on the market. Is the aleph of the collaborative economy really so well hidden and so well camouflaged that it becomes inaccessible to existing laws and to laws that are to come? Surely, through a negotiated Directive, the rights and obligations of workers in platform economy can be regulated.

This article is part of a larger investigation made for our PhD thesis, which studies work experiences of young workers of a multinational supermarket chain in Rosario. In this article, we will first approach, from a socioanthropological perspective, to the general productive process of the supermarket, emphasizing the way the skills and the content of positions determine working conditions, managerial control and are linked to different productive experiences.

This paper discusses some aspects of the digital ordinary: the growing digitalization of our everyday life with the pervasiveness of digital practices and the production and storage of digital inscriptions about our ordinary life, relationships, affects, opinions and activities, that become the content of platforms, apps and search engines, as well as the matter the so called big data are made of, whose commodification constitutes the gain source or business model of the corporations owning these platforms and apps. The sociability and forms of self(re)presentation digitally enacted present ethic and aesthetic particularities; and entail forms of contemporary digital labour, face work and affective work, subject to reflexivity, surveillance and control, which are described and discussed drawing on research about the production and sharing of digital images, such as selfies.

This article presents the results of two qualitative research applied during the Spanish economic crisis based on 47 semi-structured interviews conducted to working mothers of different social backgrounds. This group experiences the permanent and unavoidable relation between employment and family throughout everyday between different works with its precarious and resilient constraints. Their discourses make comprehensible their social position and validate subjectively their path and resistance in accordance with distinct values in spite of having a standard of living according to their social class. The sources of legitimization to develop in these different worlds are diverse and these women use them when they need it, shaping their speeches according to their subjectivity, approval and recognition.