Spatio-economic implications of Industry 4.0 in relational perspective: innovation, evolution, organization and interaction; analyzed for the example of the German textiles industry

“工业4.0”这一流行语标志着最近德国关于基于技术的工业生产发展趋势的公开辩论。这一概念与对真正的范式转变的期望有关：通过在工业价值链的所有阶段实施基于互联网的协调和通信技术（所谓的网络物理系统），参与生产过程的参与者、产品和服务以前所未有的方式相互联系。工业4.0在整个生产系统中提供了提高效率和新商业模式的扩展选择。尽管公众对工业4.0非常关注，但对其选址要求和潜在影响几乎没有实质性的了解，因此有必要对这个问题进行研究。虽然技术基础已经为人所知并不断得到进一步发展，但对于技术应用如何在若干工业部门中扩散，影响企业内部和企业之间的劳动组织以及它们与体制和地点环境的相互作用，只有模糊的想法。因此，该项目通过经济地理学、纺织技术/工程以及经济、社会和技术史的跨学科方法来研究未来与工业4.0相关的空间影响，包括环境条件和技术应用的影响。从概念上讲，研究借鉴了关系经济地理学框架，因为创新、演变、组织和相互作用的维度似乎特别适合于分析所考虑的过程领域，并且可以由跨学科项目团队广泛处理。实证工作集中在纺织工业部门，其长期传统的技术诱发的破裂在德国的位置。为了对工业4.0引发的变化进行可行的评估，经济地理学家需要与来自互补科学学科的研究人员联合起来。这就是为什么该项目整合了专业的工程科学专业知识，以捕捉纺织行业的基本创新/技术趋势，并在公司中有组织地实施。在研究这个充满历史的行业时，包括经济和技术史科学的专业知识，可以从早期的范例变化和当前案例的进化轨迹中学习。跨学科方法应在概念和方法上创造性地启发项目工作；它将历史文献和数据分析（回顾性预测）、地理实证社会研究以及在情景分析的总体框架下对企业技术系统的深刻分析相结合。

The catchword Industry 4.0 significantly marks recent public debates on technology based development trends of industrial production in Germany. This notion is connected with expectations of a veritable paradigm shift: By implementing Internet-based technologies of coordination and communication (so called Cyber Physical Systems) through all stages of the industrial value chain, the actors, products and services involved in the production process become interconnected in unprecedented ways. Industry 4.0 offers extended options of improved efficiency and new business models in the entire production system. Research on the issue is needed since, despite of the eminent public attention devoted to Industry 4.0, there is hardly any substantial knowledge about its locational requirements and potential effects. While the technology foundations are already known and constantly further developed, only vague ideas exist on how technology application could proliferate in several industry sectors, affecting the organization of labour within and between firms as well as their interaction with institutional and locational contexts. Accordingly, the project investigates through an interdisciplinary approach of economic geography, textile technology/ engineering, and economic, social and technology history, which spatial implications could be associated with Industry 4.0 in the future, relating to context conditions as well as effects of technology application. Conceptually, research draws on the relational economic geography framework, as the dimensions of innovation, evolution, organization and interaction seem to fit particularly well to analysing the regarded process field and can be broadly addressed by the interdisciplinary project team. Empirical works focus on the textile industry sector with its longstanding tradition of technology-induced ruptures at locations in Germany. For achieving a viable assessment of the changes induced by Industry 4.0 in terms of the corporate and spatial interaction of actors, economic geographers need to join forces with researchers from complementary scientific disciplines. This is why the project integrates specialized engineering science expertise to capture the essential innovation/ technology trends in the textile sector and their organized implementation in firms. And including expertise of economic and technology history science when studying this history-charged sector allows to learn from earlier paradigmatic changes and evolutionary trajectories for the current case. The interdisciplinary approach shall creatively inspire project work both conceptually and methodologically; it offers to combine methods of historical document and data analysis (retrospective forecasting), geographical empirical social research, and profound analysis of corporate technology systems under the overarching umbrella of scenario analysis.