Project Details
Projekt
The social construction of human-robot co-work in context: narratives, robot platforms, and institutional settings (SoCoRob II)
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442146413
Robots are a front end of digitalization. Their ability to navigate their environment, to collect and process perceptual data from their environment, and to manipulate their environment based on the information gathered allows them to permeate workspaces and work settings previously inaccessible to digital automation. This holds true in particular for collaborative robots. Collaborative robots are lightweight robots that are designed to perform work tasks in the vicinity and in direct collaboration with human workers without posing a threat to them by hurting them. The goal of the project is to investigate how collaborative robots become relevant for the digital transformation of working worlds by making available robotic labor in work settings where previously no robots could be employed. In particular, we want to investigate if and how the new option of direct physical interaction between human and robotic co-workers in shared work spaces leads to new forms of distribution of work tasks between human workers and technology. The project is part of the DFG priority program 2267 on the digitalization of working worlds. It expands and complements research we have conducted in the project “The social construction of human-robot co-work by means of prototype work settings (SoCoRob)” during the first funding phase of this priority program. In the first funding phase, we have applied a micro-sociological approach that focused on processes of social negotiation within projects of developing new collaborative work settings for care work and industrial production. In the second funding phase, we will widen our focus and include relevant contextual factors from the meso- and macro-level of working worlds. Based on our previous research we consider narratives, robot platforms, and differences in the institutional settings of collaborative robot development to be the most important contextual factors. They deserve our attention because they influence the social, temporal, and spatial organization of collaborative robot development. Thereby, they affect the three developmental dynamics in the digital transformation, the priority program focusses on as its conceptual heuristic: permeation, making available and self-perpetuation (“Durchdringung, Verfügbarmachung, Verselbstständigung”). We consider narratives to be most important with respect self-perpetuation, while robot platforms and institutional settings are the contextual factors with the greatest influence on the dynamics of making available and permeation. To study the history, development, and effects of these contextual factors, we will include expertise from history, care science, human-robot interaction and technology assessment.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
