Study on the relationship between digitalisation, organisational context and the sustainability of jobs.

Digitalisation holds the promise of supporting new ways of working, which necessitates jobs, teams and organisations to be redesigned. New digital technologies could offer opportunities to enable workplace innovation, to reduce work strain, to enhance autonomy and empower employees,…. in sum to enhance job quality and sustainable employment. But these new digital technologies may also be deployed to realize more employee surveillance, more standardized and short‐cycle work,… resulting in poorer quality of work. Initial research findings contradict expectations of improved work quality and increased autonomy, and seem to show a tendency toward greater standardization and control of work (Butollo et al., 2018). The question we will study is how technologies, work organization and jobs can jointly be (re)designed and implemented in an organizational context, in such a way that a high quality of work and sustainable employment can be facilitated. We will investigate company approaches to the introduction and use of digital devices and technologies at the workplace level, and gauge the impact of such changes on employment sustainability. We do not focus on technical possibilities of certain technologies themselves as point of departure, deriving (possible) technical effects on work from them. We will focus on the use of digital technology and the changes — technology-related and otherwise — at job (general job characteristics) and organizational level.