Industry 4.0: Joint Organizational Design 4.0: Revisiting the Socio Technical Principles

The adoption of 4.0 technologies for many companies implies the activation of organizational redesign processes. To reflect the changing nature of work and design practices when faced by new technology, the socio-technical systems theory has proposed a set of design principles to guide system design capable of ensuring the joint optimization of organizational performance and at the same time preserving or developing the quality of the operators' work. Through the analysis of three companies that have largely invested in digital technologies and at the same time redesigned their organizational structures, this study provides evidence on how the design principles developed by socio-technical theory are nowadays adopted, thereby indicating the possibility that the STS theory can (re) become central in both theory and managerial practices.