Ambiguities of industry 4.0: gains, efficiency, and worker tensions

Abstract

Purpose: Increasingly, organizations are seeking technological innovations to improve their processes and production stages, configuring Industry 4.0, which, despite the evident gains, has generated tensions in the world of work. Thus, this article aims to analyze how workers in this context have experienced this transition. Methodology/Approach: In methodological terms, this study was conducted through a qualitative-descriptive approach, which investigated the perception of workers involved in organizations that went through technological innovations through semi-structured interviews analyzed in the light of content analysis. Findings: The results acknowledge the benefits of technological advancement to the substantial development of the production processes of these organizations but highlight the ambiguities of Industry 4.0, such as the replacement of human labor by machine, generating unemployment, conflicts, and tensions among workers. Research Limitation/implication: The limitations of this study are the size of its corpus due to the difficulty in joining the research, imposed by the social limits caused by the pandemic. Originality/Value of paper: The discussions observed in the research point to the ambiguities that accompany this phenomenon, which has different positions and visions and points to the urgency of inserting the human component in the debates involving various sectors of society.