Digital Technologies within and beyond the Workplace: Impacts, Ambiguities, and Transformative Trends

Digital transformation (DT) is increasingly establishing itself as a constant theme in contemporary academic and practitioner conversations (Hanelt et al., 2020). Organisation scholars are attentive to the role and impact of digitalisation (Hinings, Gegenhuber and Greenwood, 2018), investigating how digital technologies affect individuals (Zuboff, 2015; 2019), organisations and professions (Foer, 2017), entire industries (Taplin, 2017), and societies (Morozov, 2011). There is no doubt that digitally-enabled arrangements permeate and reshape industries and fields, challenging organisational models, HRM practices, power structures and meaning systems (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2011). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of economy and organisations, anticipated many issues and transformations that would have taken longer to be addressed and posed unique demands in terms of conditions and scale of technology adoption at work (Wang et al., 2021). Thus, promoting theory and research development on this important substantive and methodological topic is therefore of foremost importance.

Mobile Application for Healthcare: The Case of COVID-19 in Mobile Apps

The COVID-19 era has forced us to reduce our face-to-face interactions. For this reason, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have substituted this direct relationship among people. One tool able to support health authorities by monitoring and mitigating the ongoing COVID-19 is Mobile Applications (mApps). They have also facilitated follow-up among patients and practitioners and provided direct guidance to citizens, so they can play their part in the control of the disease. The main purpose of this paper is to understand and analyse the features and functionalities of the COVID-19 mApps currently available in the widely used smartphone applications stores, such as Play Store and iTunes. The first results obtained at this stage of the research have permitted us to give a preliminary taxonomy of the mApps, specifically concerning COVID health management in Italy. The research found 71 mApps operating in the principal stores, focusing on the underlining features and aspects useful for making users more responsible and enabling self-management regarding their own health. MApps in the COVID period could represent organisational support for maintaining a useful relationship among patients and health operators concerning health care assistance. To do this, it is necessary to determine optimal capabilities and evaluate the utility and clinical benefit of these tools. Doing this, we have been able to recognise and obtain the first data and information through this research.

Book review. Aesthetics, Organization, and Humanistic Management, edited by Monika Kostera and Cezary Woźniak, New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, 254 pp., ISBN: 9780367550073

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Industry 4.0 and Digital Innovation in Manufacturing: State of the Art Technology and Future Prospects in the Italian Mechanical Engineering Sector

The label ‘Industry 4.0’ has captured increasing attention in recent years. However, despite impressive media coverage, EU activism, and being featured in many government programs, the picture of the actual diffusion and realistic industrial potential of the so-called ‘Industry 4.0 enabling technologies’ is still unclear. Far from filling this gap at the European or global level, in this paper we focus one specific, though relevant, industrial domain: the Italian mechanical engineering sector. The analysis shows the magnitude of a phenomenon that has undoubtedly been subject to some excessive rhetoric. Nevertheless, our findings show that things are progressing as the early adopters (mostly large businesses) are beginning to invest in and develop strategic plans for future action. However, most players such as small-sized family-owned enterprises are simply looking at the moment, and do not appear to have a strategy in approaching Industry 4.0 or any plan for getting on board in the near future, and this is something industrial and political leaders should take note.

The Transformation of Work in the COVID-19 Era

In March 2020, a massive experiment of work-from-home (WFH) started abruptly almost worldwide. In this article, I explore some the most important changes of the work practices linked to the work detachment from standard places, due to the COVID-19 shutdown. Notwithstanding the unprecedented nature of the shutdown experience, the changes experimented in this period might last beyond the end of the measures adopted to control the spread of the virus, due to the estimated long-term growth of remote working and the acceleration of virtuality and connectivity at work. The discussion draws on recent research on remote working and on the emerging research and theoretical debate on how COVID-19 is affecting organisation and work design, and it aims at highlighting some new directions in the evolution of work practices. Moreover, going beyond the emphasis placed on the success of the world-wide experiment of WFH backed by digital technologies, a special attention, in this analysis, is devoted to envisioning some risks associated to the transformation of work in the COVID era.

Is It Smart Working? An Analysis of the Public Discourse about Teleworking in Italy during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns in several countries, and many organisations had to introduce teleworking for their employees. While remote working is not a new thing, and was already permitted by laws, the extent to which enterprises had to redefine their process is unprecedented. Therefore, teleworking was widely discussed in national media. Newspapers are a relevant outlet for the diffusion and legitimation of schemata of interpretation, and we explored of teleworking was framed in the Italian discursive space during the first two months of the pandemic. We analysed seven national newspapers, and adopted a semi-automatic text analysis, which we performed through topic modelling. In this paper, we describe the topics that are used by newspapers to frame teleworking, the different use of these topics performed by different newspapers, the trend of topics over time, and we discuss the institutionalisation of the issue of teleworking.

Mechanisms to Engage an Online Community in Crowdsourcing: Insights from an Idea Contest in Training

Knowledge sharing is particularly important for co-creating, discussing, or acquiring innovative ideas. Crowdsourcing, as an enabler of open innovation, has raised the question about the kind of organising forms and/or managerial interventions it may require or underpin. However, there is little consensus in management studies on how to best design a crowdsourcing initiative (contest) with regard to the mechanisms to engage an online community. In this paper, starting from an exploratory case study on the project “Stati Generali della Formazione e del Lavoro” (General Assembly on Training and Work)—a crowdsourcing experience designed for a large community of professional trainers, planned and managed by University of Milano-Bicocca and AIF Academy (Associazione Italiana Formatori), a broad representative association of Italian trainers—we study the factors influencing the decision of the participants (a.k.a., solvers) to become involved (and to what extent) in a contest. The study could contribute to the debate on crowdsourcing by both underlining important governance factors involved and providing empirical evidence of the link between management strategies and crowdsourcing success.

The adoption of discontinuous technologies in the time of Covid-19: criticisms for micro family businesses.

The Covid-19 emergency has imposed on companies a new way of working through technologies that have ensured business activity. This article analyzes the dynamics of the adoption of technology in micro family businesses at the time of Covid-19, focusing on the phase in which the decision is made to adopt a technology. In particular, it analyzes the influence of the family on the adoption of discontinuous technologies. The sample studied was constituted by fifteen micro-enterprises from southern Italy. In particular, all the companies included in the research are part of Coldiretti, the largest association that represents and assists Italian farms. The companies studied were examined with a qualitative analysis conducted between March and June 2020 through semi-structured telephone interviews due to problems related to the coronavirus pandemic. The present research identifies the micro-level factors affecting the decision to adopt discontinuous technology in order to detect more clearly how innovation in the context of the family business takes place in a different and distinctive way. This study also illustrates some practical implications derived from the model developed and provides useful indications for future studies.

Where Physics Meets Biology

The frontier between Life and Physical Sciences currently includes the strategic research field where the wealth of data produced by new quantitative technologies in molecular biology naturally meets the advanced analysis and modelling tools of theoretical physics. For its profound scientific implications and huge potential impacts in biomedicine it is attracting substantial interest. Here I briefly review some of the developments in such a field.