When the wave of digitalization sweeps all walks of life, especially with the transformation and upgrading of traditional productivity to new quality productivity, new management problems in the digital era will emerge.
In my teaching in recent years, I have often been asked new questions about management in the digital age, and I will also ask some questions for students to think: For example, is a platform contractor like Didi Driver the boss or an employee? How can the three magic weapons of digitalization: data, models, and algorithms not be abused? What are the new situations of management ethics in the use of management tools in the digital age? I recently read "Digital Factory" Although the content of the book did not fully answer my above questions, it opened up new horizons and triggered new thinking about the content of the title of this article.
Moritz Ottenliard, the author of Digital Factory, is a researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where his research interests include digital labor and platform labor in urban space. He makes a stark point: if digital technology has changed anything, it has simply turned the whole world into a big factory. This view is not without bias for today's supernatural digital technology, but it can also be seen as a slap in the face. From the macro perspective of social and economic development, it reveals the essential impact of the digital economy on economic and social development.
Why is digital technology turning the world into a big factory? The authors propose three core concepts:
1. Digital Taylorism. Digital technology has allowed the classic elements of Taylorism to reappear in unexpected ways. We know that the core of the "scientific management theory" proposed by American Taylor at the beginning of the 20th century is to use scientific means, methods and tools to implement management to improve the efficiency of enterprise operation. Today's digital technology is nothing more than a vest of Taylorism on the vest of digital technology, and its essence remains the same.
2. Digital technology has multiplied the labor force. With the help of digital technology, it is possible to easily and cost-effectively connect various types and widely distributed workers without having to synchronize them in space and time. The standardization of tasks, algorithmic management, oversight of labor processes, and automatic evaluation of results and feedback enabled by digital technologies have allowed organizations to admit a wide variety of people to a variety of jobs in a variety of ways, even if their skills are different.
3. Understand the digital factory as a spatial concept, and use digital infrastructure to reconstruct the space. Digital infrastructure has enabled a profound restructuring of the spatiality of the workforce at the global level. For example, European companies can hire Indian employees as members of their call centers, and these employees can even work from their own homes.
In order to illustrate these three basic concepts, the author explains four business formats: logistics, gaming, crowdsourcing and social media. He cites many examples of industries from Amazon warehouses to online video games, from gig economy platforms to data centers, from content moderation companies to social networks, where digital technology labor relations take place. The workers in these "factories" are diverse, diverse, and often distributed in different places, but the digital factory can synchronize these workers into the production system organized by algorithms, and despite various regional differences, each digital factory has common characteristics in the organization, distribution, division of labor, control, and reproduction of labor.
As a management scholar, when reading this book, in addition to seeing the great changes that digitalization has brought to the above four major industries and other enterprises, the author also focuses on exploring the new management problems after the application of digital technology. Digitalization has brought about great changes in the organizational form and operation and management mode of enterprises, which can enable enterprises to integrate various resources around the world, effectively reduce costs and improve economic efficiency, breaking the thesis that "internal transaction costs are lower than external transaction costs" proposed by the "Coase theory" in economics, and promoting economic growth and providing various employment opportunities. However, the various management problems it brings are also self-evident. For example, while using algorithms for efficient management, how to make the tools rational and better, and take into account the scientific and humanistic nature of management methods?
FedEx Corporation (UPS), one of the largest private logistics employers in the U.S., employs more than 450,000 people worldwide and 374,000 in the U.S., Digital Factory tells us. There are more than 50,000 box truck drivers, which is a drop in the bucket compared to Meituan's nearly 7 million delivery drivers in China, but the problems are the same: long working hours, fast pace, standardization and discipline are the reasons for the general dissatisfaction of drivers. The company has good regulations on almost every move in the driver's work, and even the pocket where the writing pen is placed. More than 200 sensors are installed on each delivery van, which transmits the driver's every move and various data of the vehicle back to the company, and forms a control and reward for the driver. And China's courier brother, although riding a battery car, does not have such a high uniformity in behavior, but it is more than equal to being controlled by algorithms, and the time of each order is counted into the bones, and overtime or bad reviews will be fined. As a result, traffic accidents caused by vehicles driving in the wrong direction and running red lights are frequent, and it is common for battery cars to speed on the sidewalk and for little brothers to sprint for 100 meters in the community.
According to statistics, there are currently nearly 200 million flexible employees in mainland China, of which about a quarter are food delivery riders affiliated to various platforms, and platform enterprises have become an important and huge number of employers. Flexible employment, a new form of employment in the digital era that is attached to the platform and managed by digital tools, has created many employment opportunities and greatly facilitated people's lives. At the same time, however, this new form has also brought unprecedented new challenges to the protection of workers' rights and interests. All kinds of new forms of employment attached to the platform, such as food delivery riders and Didi drivers, are bound to various systems and are firmly calculated by various algorithms. In particular, in order to complete the assessment indicators or earn a little more hard-earned money, the delivery riders not only run faster and faster, but also work longer and longer hours. With the increasing sophistication of digital technology, digital tools such as algorithms are becoming more and more accurate, resulting in very strict assessment indicators for many platforms, leaving almost no room for improvement.
Digital technology is undoubtedly advanced and powerful. The management method implemented according to the algorithm is not only scientific, but also can significantly improve efficiency and avoid redundant waste of resources, which plays an important role in saving costs for enterprises, accelerating the development of society, and effectively managing human resources. As the author of this book points out, platforms have become, to some extent, the infrastructure of everyday life. In Shanghai, there was an accident in which the system of an online car-hailing platform was paralyzed one morning, causing a large number of office workers to be late. But we should also see that if enterprises blindly rely on digital technologies such as algorithms to engage in management, every minute and second is extremely strict and without the slightest warmth, then this is what the author of "Digital Factory" calls "digital Taylorism", and the result is that Chaplin satirized in the film "Modern Times", which will eventually alienate people's behavior, seriously reduce employee satisfaction and happiness, and eventually turn people into tools.
In the digital age, data cannot be obtained without bounds, models cannot be used without restrictions, and algorithms cannot become a copy of the "Taylor system". How to achieve science and technology for good and promote the harmonious development of society and other high-tech such as digital technology has put forward new topics for management researchers and management practitioners, and it is urgent to put forward good countermeasures, which will be of great significance for the better use of modern science and technology in enterprise management and even various organizations, so as to promote the development of new quality productivity.