Cultures of malfunctioning. The long and difficult history of the digitally networked factory

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In 2011, the term Industrie 4.0 was introduced at the Hannover Messe. It was propagated as a revolutionary (“disruptive”) paradigm of industrial production. Soon, however, questions were raised about its resemblance to Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), a concept that had its popularity in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Even though both CIM and Industrie 4.0 were used as terms propagating a (apparently) radical new concept of industrial production, some commentators questioned the revolutionary nature of Industrie 4.0, calling it "CIM-reloaded" or an "old wine in new bottles". The "failures" of CIM were revisited and highlighted again. The debates about CIM and Industrie 4.0 culminated in comparing attributes such as disruption versus evolutionary developments or conditions of failure and success. The planned project is based on many insights into the history of CIM and Industrie 4.0 from rescent research. The central idea, however, is to revisit the existing narratives that revolve around questions of evolution or disruption, around the question of the failure of CIM or the assessment of Industrie 4.0 as a "second" stage of CIM. CIM should instead be interpreted as the starting point of a history of the laborious process to establish a digitally networked factory. This process has been highly complex, difficult and accompanied by many problems and setbacks. The project aims to investigate precisely this malfunctioning, the efforts and problems of digitalization processes. Thus, the project takes current debates as the starting point for a research project that aims to shift previous narratives by taking a historical perspective and by focusing on malfunctioning. The planned project would therefore not ask for “drivers” of technological developments, but explore the history of the digitally networked factory as a typical digitalization process of a long, delayed introduction of a new technology, which always is confronted with a wide variety of obstacles and problems. While the PP “investigates systematic transformation as a process that simultaneously manifests itself in three overlapping motion dynamics: permeating (…), making available (…) and perpetuating”, the planned project turns this perspective around by not asking for effects of digitalization processes. Rather it asks for the socio-technological conditions of “permeating, making available and perpetuating”. Thereby, it suggests that the digitalization of the working world has been constructed and shaped by a long and difficult process or, to put it shortly, by a process of permanent malfunctioning. Beyond the reinterpreting the history of CIM, the proposed project has two overarching goals: First, the fundamental question of change and the mechanisms of digital transformation shall be discussed and reinterpreted from the perspective of malfunctioning and a “broken world thinking” (Jackson 2014). Second, the project aims at establishing a historiography of malfunctioning.