Dissertation project Simon Schaupp (supervised by Prof. Dr. Oliver Nachtwey)

This project examines how conflicts of interest in the implementation of the “Industry 4.0” program have influenced its concrete design. This process of negotiation, understood as production policy (Burawoy) in a technological mode, is analyzed by means of a qualitative case study involving the implementation of digital process controls. The focus lies on the connection between the three levels at which this technopolitics takes place: first, the institutional level, where the future vision of “Industry 4.0” is negotiated between companies, trade unions, state actors and scientists; second, the level of the implementation of this utopia, the site of concrete technological developments and managerial attempts to bring it about; and third, the level of the practical appropriation of the implemented technologies in everyday working life. Throughout, it is assumed that the logic of technological implementation generally conflicts with the logic of the practical appropriation of technology. On all three levels, the negotiation of what “Industry 4.0” should be is characterized by conflicting interests. A central question pursued in the study is that of the extent to which employees can influence industrial digitalization processes through “technopolitics from below,” not only in the form of institutional representation, but also in the form of practical resistance on the shop floor. In this way, it is possible to situate the utopia of cybernetically self-regulating production within the context of production policy. In order to capture this technopolitics in its discursive and non-discursive forms, a methodological triangulation of participant observation, qualitative interviews and document analysis will be used.