On work and machines: A labour process of agility

What is the relationship between workers and machines in the 'agile' economy?

In the workplace, machines can be tools of quantification, measure, calculation, and potentially control. Throughout work-design history they have functioned as catalysts for quite dramatic changes, perhaps most influentially during the period of scientific management. Today, the increasing use of digital technology across industry means that we are living and working in an era that has been described as the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'.¹

Industry 4.0 involves the use of big data for smarter decision-making and cost efficiencies (including decisions on shedding labour and how to distribute work); the use of advanced analytics to improve product development; a massive increase in human-machine interfaces; and the development of digital-to-physical transfer, i.e. 3-D printing and rapid prototyping. The underlying aim of firms adopting these technologies is of course to increase competitiveness and profit.

The main focus of this essay is a discussion about the effects of these changes within the labour process - the management of production and the impact this has on workers.² In the main, the effects have been to intensify pressure on workers through the use of technology to closely monitor performance, for example through requiring workers to wear self-tracking devices in warehouses (as already happens with Amazon and Tesco); the monitoring of productivity in call centres; the use of GPS tracking of couriers and taxi drivers; and the use of apps and algorithms to remotely monitor the performance of outsourced work in the 'gig' economy - including those working in Uber-type outfits, homeworkers using their own computers to carry out 'crowdsourced' work, or digitally-managed peripatetic care workers and cleaners.

As Schwab argues, in the fourth industrial revolution there has been a blurring of 'the line between the physical, digital and biological spheres'. We increasingly work alongside, with and against machines, in both cognitive and manual workplaces.

Given the close correspondence of new industrial ages and new styles of management, it is perhaps unsurprising that Industry 4.0 has also seen the emergence of a new management system - based on the idea of business (and worker) 'agility'.

Technology has been an increasingly dominant partner in employment relations ever since Frederick Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth busied themselves in devising schemes to understand workplace productivity as linked to specific, measured human behaviour. Those industrial pioneers of scientific management and time and motion studies championed scientific methods that could depict perfect bodily movements for ideal productive behaviours through technologically informed work design that explicitly separated mental from manual labour. Indeed, the separation of the mind from the body became a technique for control that has continued throughout the ages.

Writing in 1992, Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda delineated a sequence of historical phases of work design, from 'industrial betterment' in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to 'organisational culture and quality' methods from the 1980s onwards: 'industrial betterment' lasted from 1870 to 1900, when it was superseded by 'scientific management' (1900-1923); 'human relations' (1925-1955); 'systems rationalism' (1955-1980) and 'organisational culture and quality' (1980- (ongoing).³ As Barley and Kunda noted, these managerial approaches tended to adopt either 'normative' or 'rational' ideologies, and were linked to long-wave technological/economic cycles associated with specific periods of labour activity. For each period, there is a 'surge' stage associated with a particular rhetoric that emphasises specific aspects of work and what is most important within it, as well as which factors are expected to facilitate productivity (such as machines). These surges are then followed by a challenge to the dominant rhetoric, as the next surge - for the emerging paradigm - begins (thus replacing the previous era). We can now add to their list a sixth wave, the Agility Management System, which began to emerge at the end of the twentieth century and is currently displacing the fifth wave. This has its own ideology and rationality, as will be explored later in this article.

Management methods within each period of work design reflect assumptions about the mind, the body and the...