On the 23rd of November 2020, during a public lecture given in honour of receiving a Spinoza lens award, renowned philosopher Bruno Latour once again called for ‘dependency instead of identity’ as a way of thinking about our relationship with the environment and with one another. In essence, this paradigm invites us to think less about what we want to be (identity), and more about what we depend on in order to be (dependency). Latour dubbed this kind of awareness ‘The Parliament of Things’ – a representational space where non-human objects are on a par with humans in so far as agency is concerned. Granted, although the subject matter of Latour’s talk was the natural environment (animals, forests, air, rivers, oceans, and so on), the fundamental principles behind his explication can also reveal much about how we manage organisations, as well as about how we can manage them better despite the challenges of digitisation and of the global pandemic.

Almost 60 months prior to Latour’s lecture, Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, published a monograph entitled ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’. In it, he summarised about a decade’s worth of academic research and ongoing trends from within various professional spheres to point out that we are living through a new kind of qualitative leap in economic relations and industrial production – a new, fourth, industrial revolution. Unlike the previous three – precipitated by the steam engine, mass production, and the internet – this one would revolve around the fusion of human and machine, network connectivity, and lots and lots of data.

To be sure, the promises of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are nothing if not intoxicating. For governments, it offers new ways to add value to their economies fast, to include more people into the labour market, and to cut costs while expanding the size, quality and accessibility of public services at the same time. Proliferation of new technologies could allow small, technologically developed states to develop asymmetric defence capabilities to deter their much larger, antagonistic neighbours. For businesses, the Fourth Industrial Revolution means digitisation of work and new forms of employment, greater automation, unprecedented speed of international trading and communication, lower costs and a faster, better, and more personalised customer service than ever before. Finally, workers are set to benefit from increases in productivity, flexible and mobile work opportunities, various technologically-enabled modes of communal co-ownership and co-production, and never before seen levels of personalisation. All in all, the Fourth Industrial Revolution was not called a revolution by Schwab for nothing – the world would become faster, smarter, richer, and more entertaining as a result.

More than a decade into this trajectory, we can begin taking stock of the many things that did change. Platform companies, for one, are now pervasive, as is gig work and other new forms of employment relations; Artificial Intelligence is (very slowly) becoming usable in limited but ever-expanding contexts; wearable tech and telecommunications improved exponentially, in both speed and quality; and co-ownership/sharing/production/financing, while not exactly ubiquitous, did carve out a niche for itself in certain parts of society. But are we any better off as a result? While the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are arriving at a steady pace, the prevailing logic of capital-driven exploitation appears to have strangled the naïve romanticism of technological liberation at birth.

Entire markets are being disrupted and undercut on price in the feverish rush by platforms to achieve near-monopolistic dominance, or perish while trying. Entire classes of employees across all skill levels are being pushed into precarious working arrangements, as managers and engineers are racing to measure, automate and optimise their labour. Industries where education and tools of work are, again, the responsibility of employees, and not the employer, are no longer hard to come by. Piece work – a remuneration model popular during the first two industrial revolutions, where employees are paid for output and not for hours worked – is slowly making a comeback, for the first time since the 1960s, after having been all but consigned to the dustbin of history by the Human Relations movement and the efforts of organised labour.

Indeed, in more ways than its proponents would care to admit, the Fourth Industrial Revolution looks a lot like the Second Industrial Revolution, with its sprawling factories and mind-numbing, repetitive, dangerous work that paid very many very little. Today, we look back on those times, at the turn of the last century, with scholarly curiosity through the writings of management pioneers like F.W. Taylor, C.C. Spaulding, or M.P. Follett, or with quaint amusement through the comedic lens of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. And, as we do so, we are amazed by how unsustainable and inhumane the working conditions that people had to endure to make a living were; and how their blood, sweat, and tears made the capitalists who owned the factories and the machines that they owed their basic subsistence to richer and richer. Back then, it took two world wars and five decades of unionisation to dislodge the system and chart a new, somewhat more utilitarian course for economic development in the West.

The unwelcome arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020 highlighted how the fundamental assumptions about the roles of workers and technology in a capitalist society merely remained subdued by circumstance and regulation. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution opening market opportunities outside of the scope of existing labour law, we repeatedly observe cases of intrusive surveillance practices that disregard basic privacy, mechanical employee management (this time, by algorithms), extreme precarity and de-skilling of work, and a paradoxically unwavering trust into the objectivism of technology coupled with borderline nihilistic epistemic relativism that would somehow offend both the rational positivists of the 1920s and the dystopian fictionalists who followed them shortly thereafter, at the same time. It would seem that the contemporary champions of industry did not, or would not, learn the lessons that history has bestowed upon us.

This is why we can all stand to learn something from Bruno Latour and his oddball philosophy of the ‘parliament of things’. If the ongoing pandemic showed us anything (and it showed a lot), it is that technology is still just a tool, and not a panacea. No artificial intelligence solution employed for supply chain management or manufacturing predicted shortages of toilet paper or other essential goods, for example. Similarly, customisation algorithms used by online retail giants did not begin suggesting haircutting products to people stuck in lockdown. When the going got tough, it wasn’t the algorithms that got going, it was people. People kept the organisations running, either out of their homes via Zoom or in their actual workplaces, covered in PPE. Despite all the hype of technology, it was people that proved to be most critical. Therefore, it would serve managers and business owners well to stop thinking about their identity vis-à-vis the Fourth Industrial Revolution, to stop reaching for who they want to be, and to start thinking about being responsible and respectful to that which is fundamental to the existence of their organisations – people.