Social Manufacturing and Logistics

Abstract

This paper is dealing with the ongoing debate of the digitization of german industry, the so-called „Industrie 4.0“, and its social consequences. The discussed new technologies like cyber-physical production systems, autonomous logistic systems and smart devices are about to get integrated in work places, that are embedded in existing organizational and social structures, thus making ‘complementary innovations’ and a coordinated design necessary. Our paper presents a human-centered design of industrial labor in a framework depicting the dilemma between what is techno-logically feasible and labor-politically desirable, under the constraint of an economically reasonable design of work and technology. The analytical approach is the “socio-technical system” which as-sumes that there are certain varieties of organizational design at the interfaces of its sub-systems ‘technology’, ‘human’ and ‘organization’. These considerations are transformed into a framework, called Social Manufacturing and Logistics, which brings together these perspectives and leads to a complementary holistic design of industrial labor under the conditions of a progressive digitization of manufacturing. Its characteristics are: hybrid interaction between human and machine, flexible integrated work and decentralized systems. Finally, we outline some organizational and social con-ditions to realize such a framework.