Martin Weinel

The relative economic and political importance of the steel industry for the European project has decreased since the founding of the Economic Coal and Steel Community in 1952, but its absolute importance remains high and critical for the European project’s future success. However, for the continued survival of the European steel industry and among a wider set of challenges, the sector has to face and overcome what is often referred to as the 'twin challenges': digitalisation, in the form of Industry 4.0, and decarbonisation. This chapter discusses the twin challenges and introduces the contributions made to this edited collection, which begin to answer and address how best to respond to these challenges to safeguard the future of the European steel industry.

New digital technologies are often framed as an inevitable and determining force that presents the risk of technological unemployment and the end of work (Lloyd and Payne, 2019). In manufacturing specifically, digitalization is referred to asIndustry 4.0, a term that emerged in Germany as a central economic and industrial policy and has taken on a wider resonance across Europe (Pfeiffer, 2017). In this article, we explore the workplace implications of a specificIndustry 4.0innovation. We examine the insertion of drone technology—as a timely and topical example of industrial digital technological innovation—in the steel industry.The article brings to debates on the digital workplace a discussion of the relationship between the material forces of production and the social relations within which they are embedded (Edwards and Ramirez, 2016). Drawing on interview data from two European industrial sites, we suggest that the increasing use of drones is likely to be complicated by a number of social, economic and legal factors, the effects of which are, at best, extremely difficult to predict. Introduced for their potential as labour-saving devices, drones seemingly offer a safer and more efficient way of checking for defects in remote or inaccessible areas.However, whilst employers might imagine that digital technologies, like drones, might substitute, replace, or intensify labour, the workplace realities described by our interviewees make insertion highly contingent. We highlight several such contingencies, with examples of the ways that the steelworkers’ interests differ from those of their employers, to discuss how the insertion of digital technologies will ultimately be shaped by the power, interests, values and visions prevailing in the workplace, as well as in the wider polity and public culture.

This paper focuses on technical‐maintenance worker perspectives on the insertion of digitised drone technologies in the European steel industry. The industry is aiming for a ‘business model transformation’ by means of digitalisation, which includes the use of drone technologies for maintenance functions. In this paper, we explore on what basis might such workers embrace or resist this new technology. Drawing on data from a project investigating the use of drones for a ‘safer, faster and leaner’ workplace, we employ an analysis of technology ‘effects’ to discuss the risks and benefits to workers of drone technologies (see Orlikowski, Organ. Sci., 3, 1992, 398; Edwards and Ramirez, New Technol. Work Employ., 31, 2016, 99). The insertion and use of drone technology within the industry raises questions for the industry’s highly skilled workers and their representatives on the ‘effect’ of drone innovations on the industry’s existing structures and patterns of work.

We argue that the way in which the concept of expertise is understood and invoked has prevented progress in the debate as to whether moral philosophers can be said to be ‘moral experts’. We offer an account of expertise that draws on the role of tacit knowledge in order to provide a basis upon which the debate can progress. Our analysis consists of three parts. In the first part we highlight two specific problems in the way that the concept of expertise has been invoked in the moral expertise debate, namely the understanding of expertise as an exclusive concept and the conflation of expertise with the idea of ‘authority’. In the second part we suggest an alternative way of approaching the concept of expertise. This is based on Collins and Evans’ sociological theory of expertises. This theory provides a valuable analytical framework for thinking about claims to expertise and for drawing the kinds of distinctions which allow for different kinds of moral expertises and competencies. In the final part, we show how the application of this theory helps to avoid some of the problematic conclusions which theorists have arrived at to date and provides a common platform for debate. Ultimately, it permits the argument to be made that moral philosophers could be considered specialist members of an expert community of moral decision-makers.