Group Effect Aspects in Digitalisation Production Contexts

Across the years, production systems have recurrently turned to new digital technologies in the search for enhanced productivity and competitiveness. More recently, a prelude to a Fourth Industrial Revolution has been heard, announcing Industry 4.0 as the future of production and manufacture. It has been claimed that cyber-physical production systems would bring drastic changes in the way that people go about engaging in work. It is therefore sensible to think that the way that cooperation is accomplished within production contexts will be also affected. Based on an in-depth interview study featuring 21 participants from different companies, we go on to discuss which challenges have been emerging from recent digitalisation of production work in regard to the way that workers cooperate in accomplishing their productive activities. Our results suggest that there are associated group effects - e.g., group polarisation, hidden profiles, and exclusion - that pose relevant challenges for cooperation within these settings. In this contribution, we go on to present and discuss these results and to propose articulation spaces, which conceptually bring together aspects of coordination mechanisms and common information spaces, as a potential solution for some of those challenges.