DRAFT

The German debate on Industry 4.0 is much more narrowly focused on industry and other production-oriented
branches than the related general discourse on the digitalization of work. The
Industry 4.0 debate harks back to a single study (Frey and Osborne 2013), which estimated that
in the coming years, 47 per cent of US jobs could be automated through the application of new
digital technology.
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Other authors, too, have recently revisited an historically important argument
that had been almost forgotten (also in the sociology research on work): technological progress
may well lead to the elimination of the need for human labour (Brynjolfson/McAfee 2014;
Collins, 2013; Pistono 2014; Pupo 2014). Today, as so often during previous phases of rapid
technological change, this argument is either positively associated with the hope that monotonous
and physically strenuous work will finally be replaced with creative work (and opportunities
for training workers to be more creative), or it is negatively associated with higher unemployment
and widespread workforce de-skilling. These two diametrically opposed discourses
inevitably pop up together whenever the connections between technology and work are discussed
(Pfeiffer 2010).
Regardless of which position current studies take in this debate, and regardless of the data
used and the technologies scrutinized, the question of whether human-based activity can be automated
or converted into algorithms is nearly always addressed using the distinction between
‘routine’ and ‘non-routine’ tasks. Routine tasks are generally seen as replaceable (the ‘substitution
thesis’), and non-routine tasks are correspondingly seen as more valuable (the ‘complementarity
thesis’). Routine work is usually thought of as the materialized, static residue of experience.
However, an understanding of experience as more dynamic—as a kind of ‘high-tech
feeling’—has emerged (Bauer/Böhle/Munz/Pfeiffer/Woicke 2006). This more dynamic kind of
experience is held to have a central and non-substitutable function and to be all the more necessary
in highly automated systems. This bifurcation divides the literature. The (mostly quantitative)
research looking at effects of technology on wages, qualifications and labour markets
tends to equate experience with (usually automated) routine, but (qualitative) studies of complex
human-machine settings in the sociology of work tradition treat experience as increasingly essential
creative improvisation (Hirsch-Kreinsen 2014: 13–16). These diverging disciplines
(labour-market research and the sociology of work) with their contrasting methods (quantitative
versus qualitative) thus interpret experience in diametrically opposing ways but are united in the
assessment that experience is of central importance for understanding how technological
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It is often overlooked that 1) this estimate includes not only risks tied to digitalization but also to the ‘offshoring’ of
jobs and 2) the authors explicitly refuse to offer a prognosis, speaking rather of potential developments over a
long, uncertain period of time of one to two decades.
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