Call for paper: Digitalisation, Automation, and Job Quality: Implications for workers' health and safety
Digitalisation, Automation, and Job Quality: Implications for workers' health and safety. Call for paper ESPAnet.
La conferenza annuale di ESPAnet Italia (Network for European Social Policy Analysis) si svolgerà a Roma presso l’Università Sapienza, 9 - 11 settembre 2026.
Nell’ambito della conferenza, si terrà la sessione: “Digitalisation, Automation, and Job Quality: Implications for workers' health and safety” (n. 10), ed è aperta la call for paper per partecipare, fino al 25 Aprile 2026.
La sessione è organizzata da: Valeria Cirillo (UNIBA), Daniele Di Nunzio (Fondazione di Vittorio), Dario Guarascio (Sapienza University of Rome), Jelena Reljic (Sapienza University of Rome).
Link: https://www.espanet-italia.net/index.php/sessioni-streams?view=article&id=251&catid=28
Call for paper:
Over recent decades, investment in digital and automation technologies has increased substantially, transforming production and distribution processes in both manufacturing and service industries. These technologies promise significant improvements in efficiency, productivity, and service delivery, while also bringing about profound changes in the nature and organisation of work. A growing body of literature highlights the potential economic benefits associated with advanced operational technologies—such as greater automation, control, and interconnectivity—alongside their potentially detrimental effects on job quality, employment conditions, and, in some cases, technological unemployment (Brynjolfsson & Ford, 2015; McAfee, 2014).
Digitalisation is driving pervasive, deep, and continuous transformations of work, with far-reaching implications for organisational structures as well as for workers’ health and safety. These changes pose long-term and constantly evolving challenges (Castel, 1995; Stark & Pais, 2020) for industrial relations systems and for occupational health and safety and prevention frameworks (Cagliano et al., 2024).
Digital technologies reshape work in diverse and uneven ways, generating opportunities, risks, and ambivalences for workers’ well-being and the protection of health and safety across multiple dimensions. These include: (a) interpersonal and inter-firm relations along value chains, with new forms of work organisation, fragmentation, accountability, individualisation, and control, but also emerging opportunities for autonomy, cooperation, knowledge sharing, and mutual support; (b) working modalities, in terms of workloads, work intensity, skill requirements, and processes of upskilling and deskilling in both physical and cognitive tasks; (c) the production, management, and use of data, information, and knowledge; and (d) the ways in which workers and their representatives organise and act at company, sectoral, territorial, national, and international levels within increasingly dynamic and evolving productive and social contexts.
Against this background, this session aims to explore how, and to what extent, the adoption of digital and automation technologies affects job quality, with a particular focus on workers’ health and safety.
The session welcomes both qualitative and quantitative contributions, as well as studies adopting a comparative perspective at the European level.
Link: https://www.espanet-italia.net/index.php/sessioni-streams?view=article&id=251&catid=28
