Industrie 4.0 aus der Perspektive sozialer Innovationen

In this article, the debate on Industry 4.0 is critically examined from a research perspective oriented towards social innovation. We try to confront the exaggerated claims of its proponents in terms of inevitability, scope, relevance and promises of performance, and call attention to the risks of overvaluing such technology-centric views. In the meantime the thereby emerging discourse on Work 4.0 has developed a momentum of its own and tries to set its own trends by broadening the narrow focus on manufactories and by increasingly stressing the social interests and societal claims in the context of digitalisation. In this discourse, socio-technical basic approaches for designing digital workplaces are developed further, and governance processes mobilising civil society are expedited, though without being able to reduce the dominance of the digital agenda set by Industry 4.0. Social innovation includes participatory forms of designing workplaces and technology, but also goes beyond the concept of Industry 4.0 by granting the opportunity to analyse and design processes of transformation in terms of an intentional reconfiguration of social practices. Based on that, there is an urgent need for further development of existing governance models of digital transformation that put more focus on social innovation and thereby bring the question of how to deal with digitality on a creative and need-oriented basis more into the spotlight.