Industry 5.0 and the dream of a human centred, sustainable, resilient future of work

In early 2020s the European Community released a series of policy briefs and expert reports on ‘Industry 5.0’. These articulated a strange mix of imagined futures of work against a background of Industry 4.0 that appeared to be driving towards digital Taylorism rather than a more utopian horizon of digital augmentation and empowerment. Through Horizon, the EC also put some money behind the Industry 5.0 vision. This paper will report on some initial findings from one of these projects: Upskilling for Industry 5.0 Rollout.

‘Upskill’ was a large project, across Sweden, Germany, Italy and the UK, encompassing organizations from large auto-manufactures to micro-enterprises manufacturing hand-crafted musical instruments. The focus of this project was 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 paper will touch on some of this empirical work whilst stepping back to articulate two cross-cutting findings.

First, we suggest that Industry 5.0 is best understood as a kind of empty signifier. In this respect the point-oh suggests an absence (point-zero) that literally adds no information but functions as a supplement, holding a space for fantasy and desire to invest, whilst also promising jouissance  through the repetition of change/no-change, compulsively repeating an empty industrial-revolutionary gesture. It also functions pragmatically to hold an empty space into which fantasies can be projected. Here we understand the Industry 5.0 discourse, mobilised around three pillars of sustainability, human-centrism, and resilience, each of which is open to divergent interpretations but holds a space for the anxieties of a post-colonial, melancholic Europe to be salved.

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 and YouTube clips constitute disparate elements of a manufacturing eco-system that elude capture by the phantasmatic macro-discourses of policy wonks, consultants, and engineers of future imaginaries. In this excessive materiality we might see both mess and, just possibly, a less than utopian hope.

Speaker

Chris Land is Professor of Work and Organization at Anglia Ruskin University, where he leads the Centre for Research into the Organization of Work and Consumption (CROWC).  Chris’ research is currently focussed on the future of work, including work on a large, Horizon EU project using ethnographic research methods to examine the implications of Industry 5.0 innovations for skills and job quality in the manufacturing sector. He is also interested in alternative imaginaries of the ‘future of work’ for example in science fiction, utopianism, and in artisanal, neo-craft sectors like craft-brewing.