Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Seminar Series. "Digitalization and the reorganization of work: Production patterns, social relations, and power in two manufacturing sectors"
Published: 27 March 2024
25 April 2024. Associate Professor Mathieu Dupuis, Laval University
Associate Professor Mathieu Dupuis, Laval University
"Digitalization and the reorganization of work: Production patterns, social relations, and power in two manufacturing sectors"
Thursday, 25 April 2024. 14:00-15:30
Room 492, Adam Smith Business School & PGT Hub
Abstract
Digitalization in workplaces is often depicted as an inherently disruptive factor that reconfigures employer-workers relations. In this talk, I will analyze whether the adoption of digital technologies affects the work processes on the shopfloor and how social relations between workers and managers influence different aspects of the labour process. In line with recent critical contributions on digitalization and work, I argue that digital technologies are by nature embedded in social relations, and hence modified to suit specific contexts, often through negotiation and contestation in the workplace. How labour and managers employ power and how this power is translated in social institutions play a crucial role in how work is organized.
Empirically, this presentation is based on the results case studies in the aluminum sector and rubber transformation industry. From 2021 to 2023, I conducted 89 interviews (unionists/workers, managers, experts), engaged in nonparticipant observation within plants, and analyzed collective agreements. Digitalization in these plants includes several technical changes, the most significant ones being data collection, the implementation of distance control centres, automation, and direct digital communications with shop-floor workers.
My results indicate that the adoption of digital technologies had similar and diverging effects. Concerning tasks, all cases exhibited pressurization of shop-floor workers through standardization, while enlargement of tasks was limited to the rubber industry. The skills level remains mostly unchanged in aluminum while the rubber cases show some forms of deskilling since digital technologies unequally affect occupational structures and are regulated through internal labour markets. Workers’ participation was also limited in all cases. These variable effects are the result of the institutional structures and different sources of power inherited from managers and worker practices that mediate the use of these technologies. Digitalization should thereby be analyzed as a variable factor dependent on the relative power of local actors and how work processes were previously arranged.
Bio
Mathieu Dupuis is an associate professor of labour relations in the Department of Industrial Relations at Laval University in Quebec City, Qc, Canada. He holds a PhD in Industrial Relations from the Université de Montréal (2016) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Industrial and Labor Relations School (ILR School) of Cornell University (2016-2017). He is a co-researcher at the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la mondialisation et le travail (CRIMT) and is also associated with the Automotive Policy Research Centre (APRC) and the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA).
His research examines how local actors in multinational manufacturing companies negotiate, adapt or are constrained by socio-economic and political changes in the spheres of production, labor and employment. Past projects included a study of union strategies during corporate restructuring and to reverse outsourcing. He is currently pursuing work on the impact of technological change on different stakeholders and work organization, a project funded by SSHRC and FRQSC. His research is carried out in comparative perspective (Quebec, Canada, United States, Western Europe) and through case studies (automotive, transport equipment manufacturing, metalworking sector). New projects include research on the impact of environmental transition on workers in the manufacturing sector.
His work has been published in numerous national and international journals, such as: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Competition and Change, European Journal of Industrial Relations and Economic and Industrial Democracy.
For further information, please contact business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk
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First published: 27 March 2024