Organizational Changes and Work Design in the Context of Industry 4.0 – A Paradigm Change

Industrial production is currently experiencing a revolutionary transformation through digitization processes and networked technology, so that it necessarily goes through a series of essential changes, which require conceptual design and creation of new terms. In the field of social organization of work, the processes of management and control are experiencing radical changes, and many novelties that bring technological innovations provide the opportunity to analytically observe the interaction relationships of different systems, without losing individuals, organizations and society in the context. Given that digital transformation is not a uniform process, the paper presents the advantages of a holistic approach in the analysis of organizational changes. New ways of organizing work bring various kinds of challenges that must be understood in order to be able to detect the social mechanisms that are at the very basis of change. The paper points out the specific social dimensions of technology that appear during the creation of organizational processes within the framework of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The very term ‘industrial revolution’ is understood in the paper in a broader sense, and includes changes in social relations and the status of certain social groups, and not only changes in the production process and factors of production. The paper explains the status changes in power that are connected with the possibility of making business decisions in various forms of organizational practices, showing the increasingly pronounced complexity of interactional relationships between people and technology, which points to the necessity of interdisciplinary observation and finding a holistic approach to understanding the nature of the changes that are taking place.