Workforce between autonomy and control – effects of digitalization on employment relationships in the logistics industry

Logistics as a global innovative industry is experiencing fundamental changes because of digitalization. New business models are emerging and the organization of work is changing. In this way, work processes can be recorded and controlled digitally and transparently. This article examines the effects of these technological changes on logistics workers and their employment relationships. The aim is to analyze the digitalization of urban food logistics regarding the perception of autonomy and control from the worker’s perspective and the resulting effects on the design of employment relationships. The analysis is based on a qualitative study with professional truck drivers and cyclists in urban food logistics. The results show a ambivalence between the concurrence of autonomy and control in daily work, which can be connected to the integration of new technologies into work organization as well as the role of managers. Finally, requirements for a structured consideration of this interrelationship in digitalization processes are presented

What Europe Knows and Thinks About Algorithms Results of a Representative Survey. Bertelsmann Stiftung eupinions February 2019

We live in an algorithmic world. Day by day, each of us is affected by decisions that algorithms make for and about us – generally without us being aware of or consciously perceiving this. Personalized advertisements in social media, the invitation to a job interview, the assessment of our creditworthiness – in all these cases, algorithms already play a significant role – and their importance is growing, day by day. The algorithmic revolution in our daily lives undoubtedly brings with it great opportunities. Algorithms are masters at handling complexity. They can manage huge amounts of data quickly and efficiently, processing it consistently every time. Where humans reach their cognitive limits, find themselves making decisions influenced by the day’s events or feelings, or let themselves be influenced by existing prejudices, algorithmic systems can be used to benefit society. For example, according to a study by the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration, automotive mechatronic engineers with Turkish names must submit about 50 percent more applications than candidates with German names before being invited to an in-person job interview (Schneider, Yemane and Weinmann 2014). If an algorithm were to make this decision, such discrimination could be prevented. However, automated decisions also carry significant risks: Algorithms can reproduce existing societal discrimination and reinforce social inequality, for example, if computers, using historical data as a basis, identify the male gender as a labor-market success factor, and thus systematically discard job applications from woman, as recently took place at Amazon (Nickel 2018)

Rewriting the Matrix of Life. Biomedia Between Ecological Crisis and Playful Actions

The paper discusses concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘life’ as subjected to historical changes. The 21st century seems to be obsessed with ‘life’ and ‘nature’, which are reconfigured as objects of simulation practices and of a multitude of technoscientific enterprises as well as of political struggle. The historical influences and epistemological shifts of systems thinking are significant within two distinctive and interwoven fields: On the one hand the discourse of environmentalism with the paradigm of ecological crises, centered around ideas of resource management, sustainability, the general idea of an ‘endangered nature’ and the interconnectedness of global politics and individual actions. On the other hand the optimistic promises of artificial life, with synthetic biology and digital cyborg technologies as its avantgarde, which are very much driven by the idea of technoscientific mastery to surpass natures ‘weakness’ and by desires to improve ‘life’ and to even refashion ‘life itself’. On the field of historical ecology, concepts of systems thinking are traced back to the middle of the 19th century, where ecological thought emerged at the intersections of biology and geography. Meandering between vitalistic, holistic, and mechanistic concepts, between living and non-living elements, systems ecology finally substitutes ‘nature’, which in turn is re-established in its new ‘gestalt’ as computer simulated world model since the early 1970s. Resurrected as an interrelation of system variables at the level of global simulations ‘nature’ strikes as a zombie. As a second turning point of the rewriting of the matrix, of life we will discuss the advance of ‘games’ since the early 1970ies, with the example of ‘Game of life’ (‘Life’) as a significant landmark. When ‘life’ becomes ‘Life’, it is by computerized modeling in terms of dynamic processes. Computer games can be thought of as instances of the popularization of cybernetic system thinking, functioning as interdiscoursive fragments between the specialized discourse of system theories and the sphere of ‘common sense’ (Nohr 2008), where the specific “gaming situation” (Eskelinen 2001) foregrounds playful individual action and manipulation of system objects within a set of given rules or the manipulation of system rules itself on the level of the ‘code’. We will argue that both, the ecological discourse and the algorithmic model of self-reproduction of ‘Life’, are historically and systematically related manifestations and mediations of system theory. While they can be regarded as referring to different scales of application (macro-economic reasoning in the case of global eco-systems, modeling of bottom-up-complexity on a micro-level in the case of ‘Life’) and belonging to distinctive disciplines (economic and ecological research vs. mathematical theory of automata and artificial life studies), they share some common ground in being “algorithmic media” (Marks 2014) that are functional as “rhetorical software” (Doyle 1997) and as “allegorithms” (Galloway 2006) of the new compositions of the techno-biological and techno-ecological situation of the 21st century

Proceedings der 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) - Band 1

The two volumes represent the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik WI2013 (Business Information Systems). They include 118 papers from ten research tracks, a general track and the Student Consortium. The selection of all submissions was subject to a double blind procedure with three reviews for each paper and an overall acceptance rate of 25 percent. The WI2013 was organized at the University of Leipzig between February 27th and March 1st, 2013 and followed the main themes Innovation, Integration and Individualization.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge ManagementDie zweibändigen Tagungsbände zur 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) enthalten 118 Forschungsbeiträge aus zehn thematischen Tracks der Wirtschaftsinformatik, einem General Track sowie einem Student Consortium. Die Selektion der Artikel erfolgte nach einem Double-Blind-Verfahren mit jeweils drei Gutachten und führte zu einer Annahmequote von 25%. Die WI2013 hat vom 27.02. - 01.03.2013 unter den Leitthemen Innovation, Integration und Individualisierung an der Universität Leipzig stattgefunden.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge Managemen

Rethinking evolution, entropy and economics: A triadic conceptual framework for the maximum entropy principle as applied to the growth of knowledge

Recently, the maximum entropy principle has been applied to explain the evolution of complex non-equilibrium systems, such as the Earth system. I argue that it can also be fruitfully deployed to reconsider the classical treatment of entropy in economics by Georgescu-Roegen, if the growth of knowledge is seen as a physical process. Relying on central categories of Peirce's theory of signs, I follow the lines of a naturalistic evolutionary epistemology. In this framework, the three principles of Maximum Entropy (Jaynes), Maximum Power (Lotka) and Maximum Entropy Production can be arranged in a way such that evolution can be conceived as a process that manifests the physical tendency to maximize information generation and information capacity. This implies that the growth of knowledge is the dual of the process of entropy production. This theory matches with recent empirical research showing that economic growth can be tracked by measures of the throughput of useful work, mediated by the thermodynamic efficiency of the conversion of exergy into useful work. --Peirce,Georgescu-Roegen,maximum entropy,maximum power,natural selection,semeiosis,physical inference devices,economic growth,useful work

An AI-driven design method as basis for teaming

The product development process could benefit from a synergistic human-machine teaming, potentially shortening product development cycles and improving product performance and sustainability. However, there is a lack of available methods to achieve this goal. A technical product has to satisfy numerous requirements. Due to the variety and complexity of these requirements, the design process is challenging for human engineers. While engineers are supported by various tools (e.g. FEM) for analyzing product properties, tools for computer-aided synthesis of product properties considering the corresponding requirements are still only available in exceptional cases. However, such synthesis capabilities are necessary to qualify a computer-aided tool for productive teaming with engineers. Special methods based on artificial intelligence show a high potential for general computer-aided synthesis methods. This contribution presents an innovative approach in this direction based on topology optimization techniques

An extension of the projected gradient method to a Banach space setting with application in structural topology optimization

For the minimization of a nonlinear cost functional $j$ under convex constraints the relaxed projected gradient process $\varphi_{k+1} = \varphi_{k} + \alpha_k(P_H(\varphi_{k}-\lambda_k \nabla_H j(\varphi_{k}))-\varphi_{k})$ is a well known method. The analysis is classically performed in a Hilbert space $H$. We generalize this method to functionals $j$ which are differentiable in a Banach space. Thus it is possible to perform e.g. an $L^2$ gradient method if $j$ is only differentiable in $L^\infty$. We show global convergence using Armijo backtracking in $\alpha_k$ and allow the inner product and the scaling $\lambda_k$ to change in every iteration. As application we present a structural topology optimization problem based on a phase field model, where the reduced cost functional $j$ is differentiable in $H^1\cap L^\infty$. The presented numerical results using the $H^1$ inner product and a pointwise chosen metric including second order information show the expected mesh independency in the iteration numbers. The latter yields an additional, drastic decrease in iteration numbers as well as in computation time. Moreover we present numerical results using a BFGS update of the $H^1$ inner product for further optimization problems based on phase field models