Paper short abstract:

The goal of the paper is to elaborate on the way computing technologies, automation systems and processes reconstruct the working environment and influence social relations in a contemporary production plant.

Paper long abstract:

Workers of the factories that are part of global corporations operate within an environment dominated by various computing technologies and automation systems, which determine multiple aspects of work experience to a substantial extent. Systems, programs and algorithms create an infrastructure that determines communication, managerial practices (including technologies of the self), production processes, and the way workers approach their everyday tasks and challenges. Computers gather, store and partially analyze an enormous amount of data used to control, discipline and shape the behavior of people, materials, products, and machines. In this presentation I would like to show the specificities of the socio-technical assemblage and how it shapes the nature of such work. In particular, I will focus on working relations and communication, and the way work ethics is imagined and performed. Discussing the issue, I will refer to the ethnographic research I conducted between 2015 and 2016 in a production plant located in Lower Silesia Province, in south-western Poland.