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Industry 5.0 and automation: the European dream of a human centred, sustainable, and resilient future of work
Abstract
In early 2020s the European Community released a series of policy briefs and expert reports on ‘Industry 5.0’. Where Industry 4.0 had delivered digital Taylorism, control and the threat of technological unemployment, Industry 5.0 promised a more utopian horizon of digital augmentation and empowerment, placing the human at the centre of innovation, alongside a more resilient and sustainable future for European manufacturing. This seminar will report on some initial findings from a Horizon EU funded project researching the skills and innovation realities of Industry 5.0 in practice: Upskilling for Industry 5.0 Rollout.
‘Upskill’ is a large project, across Sweden, Germany, Italy and the UK, encompassing a range of organizations from large auto-manufacturers to micro-enterprises making hand-crafted musical instruments. The focus of the project is on future skills, using ethnographic and qualitative research methods to understand the innovation process, careers, and shifting skills profiles cutting across this section of European manufacturing. This presentation will report on this empirical work whilst also stepping back to articulate some preliminary conceptual contributions arising from the research.
The first of these asks what ‘Industry 5.0’ is, and why the ‘point-zero’ is important. We suggest that Industry 5.0 is best understood as an empty signifier (Cederström and Spicer, 2014) where the point-zero stands in for a constitutive absence - zero - that discursively functions to hold a space open for a diverse range of stakeholders to project their desires and anxieties about the future of work in European manufacturing. The result is to constitute often contradictory ‘imagined futures’ (Beckert, 2016) that enable a coalition to be built, at least temporarily, around the idea of Industry 5.0. In practice, these disjointed imaginaries often break down when subjected to the stress-test of concrete innovation projects. This part of the talk draws on empirical examples from our ethnographic research to illustrate the more conceptual argument that the political discourse of Industry 5.0, built on the three pillars of sustainability, human-centrism, and resilience, may be unable to suture the contradictions and tensions in the experiential realities of the manufacturing workplace, particularly given the political fractures in present day Europe.
Our second conceptual interpretation of our findings shifts attention to the meso-level of the enterprise, where we recast SMEs as Strange Mixed Ecologies, where skills, human bodies, machines from the 1950s, cobots, algorithms, summer parties, family succession planning, science fiction, AI-algorithms, and YouTube clips constitute disparate elements of a manufacturing eco-system that elude capture by the constantly escape from the Industry 5.0 container that is supposed to transport Europe into the future of work. Whilst most European manufacturing employment is in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), the reality in these organizations is often one of low-capitalisation, locally embedded networks and a range of business concerns and stakeholders that are much more diverse than the conventionally assumed ‘business’ interest of the bottom line. To understand the innovation process, and potential for Industry 5.0 to become a reality, we argue, requires a greater appreciation of the heterogeneity of SMEs as ‘Strange Mixed Ecologies’ constituted by a diverse and precarious set of networked coalitions that make large-scale changes significantly more challenging than the dominant, technologically determinist discourses of innovation policy and practice recognises.
Chris Land is Professor of Work and Organization at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, in the UK, where he leads the Centre for Research into the Organization of Work and Consumption. In 2024 he published The Handbook of Organizing Economic, Ecological and Societal Transformation with De Gruyter, co-edited by Elke Weik and Ronald Hartz. His research is currently focussed on digital transformations in work but spans a wide range of topics related to the ‘future of work’, including wellbeing and sustainability, the resurgence of ‘craft work’ as a counter-hegemonic imaginary of the future of work, and the articulation of work along unequal global supply chains.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Internationalisation Process of FirmsThe Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Internationalisation Process of Firms
Abstract
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence/machine learning technologies (AI/ML) it is now opportune to consider the potential for these technologies to create new strategies for internationalisation. This seminar will discuss how AI can enable born-digital firms to bypass traditional methods of internationalisation, such as foreign direct investment (FDI), which rely on understanding country-level proxies for consumer behaviour. Instead, by using AI, born-digital MNEs can impute revealed preferences of individual users directly from their interactions with the firm, facilitating a new, country-agnostic approach to internationalisation. We will then discuss how this approach has the potential to generate data network effects that can be harnessed to generate competitive advantage. We conclude by exploring the applicability of these new approaches to internationalisation and competition to other businesses where digitalisation can play a role. This leads us to identify a series of industry characteristics that determine how viable it is for firms across a spectrum of industries from high to low digitalisation potential to pursue these new internationalisation strategies.
The seminar will discuss and further develop the ideas of the attached paper.
Peter Williamson is Emeritus Professor of International Management at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and Fellow of Jesus College. Formerly with Merrill Lynch and The Boston Consulting Group, he earned his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. During his subsequent academic a career, he has held professorships at London Business School, Harvard Business School, and INSEAD (in Fontainebleau and Singapore). He was elected Fellow of the Academy of International Business in 2018 in recognition of his contribution to the field.
His research covers globalisation, strategy, M&A and ecosystem innovation. He is the author of ten books. The latest, Ecosystem Edge (2020) explains how companies can build and leverage a network of partnerships the sustain competitiveness in the face of disruption. His more than 60 articles span Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and Journal of Industrial Economics, and numerous managerial pieces in the Harvard Business Review, the MIT-Sloan Management Review, and California Management Review.
Peter has served as a non-executive director of across a wide variety of industries, including: textiles; whisky; green energy; hedge funds; software; and sales training. He is currently Chairman of the fast-growing, digital process automation and AI cloud services company Bizagi Group Inc.