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Limits to Digitization of Work? Automation and Substitution Potentials of Digital Systems
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC30 Sociology of Work (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
The workshop aims at presentations exploring the limits of digitization and automation of work. It is intended to constitute a sociologically informed corrective to excessive technological optimism and to perspectives of digital substitution of work as an inevitable and natural development. The idea of this workshop is emphatically not to discuss whether resp. to what extent traditional limits of automation can now be overcome by new technologies, as self-learning systems, in order to increasingly replace human workers. Rather to explore the inherent limits of automation by means of digital systems.
These limits of digitization might become manifest in…
a) problems of (economical, ecological, social) side-effects and consequential costs,
b) dilemmas of digital automation of work (e.g. of an organizational nature), generating new expenses and hence engendering new working tasks,
c) the limited technological detectability and measurability of work action, work contexts and complex socio-technological interrelations, resp. the limits to transformation into the formal binary logics of data,
d) systematical restrictions to the explicability of implicit knowledge, experience, embodiment. As a last consequence, the workshop will address the question of permanent and insurmountable limits to the digitization of human action.
This call invites presentations and papers that empirically and/or theoretically build upon the ideas above, locating, describing and examining the limits to digitization on the macro level of society, the meso level of organization, and/or the micro level of concrete work activities.
Each presentation should not exceed 10 to 12 minutes, discussion included.