New technologies and work transformations

The focus is on the organizational change induced by the development of information technologies. A careful analysis of regulation reveals that what is often presented as autonomy in work is, in many cases, not autonomy at all, that is, not the result of rules established by the acting subject, but rather the result of rules imposed by others, and increasingly, as information technology advances, through digital procedures. From the initial research on “computer-aided” design, Masino’s theory allowed unraveling these false autonomies in the subsequent, numerous transformations of work, up to the recent confusions induced in cases of activities that appear legally “independent” but are in fact rigidly constrained in content.