The Fourth Industrial Revolution? Labour in Times of Digitisation
Around the world, the impact of digitisation on labour is widely discussed. In many accounts, the
rising importance of new technologies is presented as a force of nature, overpowering mankind and
leaving many without a job. In this paper, instead, current trends in digitisation will be considered as
new technological options, which might or might not be applied on the shop-floor and which can
have strikingly different results, depending, first of all, on specific power relations, within companies
and beyond. Based on the findings of current research in the field of labour sociology, it will be
argued that the technological developments we witness today tend to reinforce processes of
precarisation, flexibilisation, and skill polarisation that can be observed since the 1980s. Nicole Mayer-Ahuja is professor of sociology at University of Goettingen, Germany, and director of
the Sociological Research Institute (SOFI). Her research focuses on labour, the labour market and its
regulation, from a historical and transnational perspective.