Does digitalization reinforce, or even strengthen, structures of domination? Or does it instead foster social emancipation? These questions are as old as digitalization itself.1 Various disciplines and fields of study, including sociology, organization studies (OS), and science and technology studies (STS) continue to engage in debates as to how the political qualities of digital technologies play out under different circumstances. Weaving together some of the threads that constitute those conversations, the present volume assembles theoretical perspectives as well as detailed empirical investigations that shed light on the relationship between current forms of digitalization and new dynamics of emancipation and domination. However, our contribution distinguishes itself from the larger discussion on digitalization by homing in on a subject that has, regrettably, moved out of focus in the social sciences: industry. While the reorganization of industry and industrial production was at the very heart of classical discussions of social emancipation and domination (e.g., Blauner, 1964; Braverman, 1974; Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1985; Marx, 1976), over the last 30 or so years, it has receded from the limelight. The topic of industry has fallen out of favor both as an empirical phenomenon in Western societies and as a subject of scholarly interest. On the one hand, attention has shifted to processes of consumption and use (Bourdieu, 1984; Featherstone, 2007 [1991]; Miller, 1987; Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003), on the other hand, to processes of knowledge production (Jasanoff, 2004; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Latour, 1987; Latour & Woolgar, 1986) and knowledge work (Drucker, 1993; Orlikowski, 2002; Star, 1995).
Only with the most recent wave of digitalization has interest in industry and industrial production been rekindled among politicians, social scientists, and the broader public. Industrial robots have returned to the covers of major newspapers and magazines; governments are negotiating strategies for dealing with the “next wave of digitalization,” and scholars are quick to compete for public and private funding as well as for grandiose claims in journals, at conferences, and in popular monographs. Out of this growing body of scholarship, we have selected the issues of work, digital fabrication, and the configuration of users as the focal points of the present volume, with separate sections of the book dedicated to each of these topics. We chose these themes because they point us to three ongoing debates which strike us as particularly relevant with regard to the dynamics of emancipation and domination in digitalizing industries, and as particularly contested in their analyses of these processes.2
Concerning the dynamics of emancipation and domination in the workplace, for example, hopes emerged that industrial automation and digitalization would lead to a “postcapitalist” society (Mason, 2015; Srnicek & Williams, 2015). They were quickly rebutted, however, as a fetishization of technology (Fuchs, 2016; Thompson & Briken, 2017). Some authors see networked communication technologies, coupled with the ubiquity of private computers, as a material precondition for democratic organizations (Sattelberger et al., 2015). Others point to the ubiquity of digital sensor technologies in production, warning that it may lead to a revitalization of classical Taylorism and a radicalization of surveillance (Zuboff, 1988, 2019).
Promises of emancipation through digital fabrication are frequently connected to this discussion, but often point beyond the confines of the workplace. Technologies like 3D printing are hailed as tools which will democratize production and innovation, encouraging the spread of peer production infrastructures such as shared machine shops, as well as enabling grassroots movements and open source communities (Ferdinand et al., 2016; Gershenfeld, 2005; Raymond, 2001; von Hippel, 2005). Other accounts focus on the instrumentalization of these movements by large firms (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2008; Jensen & Krogh Petersen, 2016) and emphasize the intimate relationships between digital fabrication technologies and the capitalist logic of value production (Braybrooke & Smith, 2018). Moreover, it bears mentioning that grassroots communities have themselves given rise to profit-oriented corporations (Ferdinand & Meyer, 2017).
One related question is how the digitalization of contemporary industries contributes to emancipating, configuring, and infrastructuring users. In this area, developments such as digital mass customization platforms (Pine, 1993; von Hippel & Katz, 2002; Piller, 2004) and the increased speed of design iterations have sparked optimism when it comes to escaping the perils of mass production. Yet, critical scholars have pointed out that computer-aided design is also threatening traditional trades and crafts (Sennett, 2008). What is more, mass customization is a long haul from true custom production (coons, 2016). The growing ubiquity of the digital means of production has been said to foster user- and community-based innovation (Benkler, 2006; von Hippel, 2005). More recently, however, it has been argued as well that companies increasingly “produce” users (Hyysalo et al., 2016) or configure them to become sources of unpaid labor (Drewlani & Seibt, 2018; Johnson et al., 2014; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010).
While we welcome and, to some degree, participate in this newfound enthusiasm surrounding the promises and pitfalls of digitalization, there are three reasons why we find large parts of the current debates to be somewhat unsatisfactory. First of all, many popular contributions subscribe to a simplistic linear logic of industrial development, labeling current dynamics as the second machine age (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2014), the third industrial revolution (Rifkin, 2011), or even Industrie 4.0 (Kagermann, Lukas, & Wahlster, 2011). Often driven by an implicit technological determinism, these accounts frequently miss historical continuities, ironies and, above all, the myriad opportunities that actually exist for companies and users to make a difference in the design, implementation, and use of technologies. Second, many contributions take either an alarmist or a techno-optimist stance toward digitalization in industries. New sociomaterial configurations are either hailed as the forerunners of a technologized utopia (Mason, 2015) or demonized as a new level of domination by states and multinational corporations (Zuboff, 2019) as well as an impending age of mass unemployment (Frey & Osborne, 2017). What these polarizing characterizations miss, however, is the more intricate, and often ambiguous, dynamics that happen between total domination and total emancipation. Third, critical social-scientific analysis is hampered by the vague and indiscriminate use of its central concepts. While notions such as digitalization and industry seem to be everywhere and their relationship with dynamics of emancipation or domination are commonly asserted, these terms are rarely defined or subjected to any scrutiny. Yet, as long as we do not know what we mean by industry, digitalization, and emancipation/domination, any attempt at analyzing the relationships between these concepts is bound to fail or, at the very least, remain incompatible with other analyses.
The remainder of this introduction is therefore dedicated to sketching out how the present volume attempts to tackle these shortcomings by laying some of the foundations for an analytical understanding of digitalized industries and the dynamics of domination and emancipation. While we will introduce the contributions to the volume at the end of this introduction, the most important task that we have set out for this chapter is to provide some conceptual clarity as to how the terms industry, digitalization and domination/emancipation may be understood. As we described above, the ext...