Beyond “Industry 4.0”

The “Industry 4.0” paradigm is present in the strategy of governments, employers' associations and trade union federations. Revisiting Piore and Sabel's classic study on flexible specialisation, we criticise the one-sidedness and narrowness inherent in the discourse of Industry 4.0, to which we counter empirical analyses on decentralised factory networks. Contrary to the prevailing stylised account, flexibility is facilitated by “B2B” platforms that link manufacturers and customers – a model that relies more on the versatility of decentralised manufacturing networks than on sophisticated production technology. The effects on labour are ambivalent, as they involve both potential for a small-scale, skilled-labour-intensive manufacturing paradigm, and dangers arising from competitive pressure for cost reduction. In sum, our aim is to offer theoretical and empirical evidence for understanding changes in digitised manufacturing and to highlight the approach of “B2B” networks and platforms in the debate on the transformation of manufacturing and industrial work.

The Rise, Decline, and Regeneration of Industrial Districts

Who does what, and how, is central to Human Resource Management (HRM). Where people do it has been central to theories of location and the clustering of firms in industrial districts. Yet there has been little synergy boundary spanning between HRM and location theories. This chapter seeks to redress this in relation to the rise and decline of industrial districts of small and medium firms and to draw implications for their potential regeneration. It relates this to cost-based models of locational and competitive advantage, theories of flexible specialisation, the “triple helix” concept of enterprise-university-government relations, and the challenges both for entrepreneurs and for policy makers in an era in which industrial districts are no longer only local but already have “gone global.” In forwarding the concept of “enhanced HRM,” the chapter advocates that public policies for SMEs should encourage surfacing tacit knowledge in new product innovation, achieving kaizen style continuous improvement, stretching core competences, profiling and extending latent abilities and implicit skills, and boundary spanning to synergise research with new high-tech start ups. While critical both of Michael Porter’s dismissal of tacit knowledge and kaizen, and of European research and regional policies, the chapter gives examples of success in such policies and how “enhanced HRM” can draw from them to regenerate industrial districts.