Editorial.
| Autor | de Mello, Adriana Marotti |
Special issue theme: organizations and digital work in contemporariness
Sociologist Georg Simmel stresses technology relevance as a social determinant of modernity, considered by him as a scientific-technological era (Garcia, 2007). Robots and process automation technologies have increasingly become commonplace in business operations within organizations since the so-called Third Industrial Revolution. Many industries have already automatized their processes, such as manufacturing, chemical plants, health and aviation. Automation advocates claim, and it will promote workers well-being by performing traditional repetitive or life-risking tasks. In some companies, robots will completely replace labor (Madakam, Holmukhe, & Jaiswal, 2019).
While automation replaces a variety of jobs, new ones are being created, and they demand highly qualified and specialized professionals (Lima & Bridi, 2019). Nowadays, technology tracing to Fourth Industrial Revolution, or digital revolution, sharpens the challenges to be faced in the new digital economy, platform economy or sharing economy (Gandini, 2018; Fleming, 2017). "Artificial Intelligence", "Internet of Things" and "management through algorithms" definitely entered contemporary social and organizational lexica. Machines that solve problems, machines sending data to other machines, a mathematical system that manages activities and--why not?--full companies have transformed the way of managing other companies, transformed labor relations and transformed interactions with consumers. More than a scientific forewarning, this is reality for many start-ups, companies that emerge and grow very quickly, usually founded on digital technologies and organizational cultures guided by great pressure for results, attention to diversity practices--that they aim to promote--and attention to symbolic violence (psychological harassment, among others)--that they aim to restrain.
Furthermore, technology coupled with personal devices makes working possible at any moment, in any place, progressively hindering the separation between personal and professional lives. As a consequence, work hours are consistently increasing, as well as the pressure on professionals for being permanently available, 24 hours a day, seven days a week (Bessi et al., 2007). For Srnicek (2017), "new technologies, new organizational forms, new models of exploitation, new types of jobs, and new markets, all emerge to create a new way of accumulating...
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