Abstract

Technological innovation not only enables processes and products that were previously impossible, but also profoundly influences the nature, values, and organisation of work. However, although technology is an enabler of productive innovation, it is not enough to ensure that it actually occurs or to precisely determine its direction. In other words, technologies make innovation possible, but only organisational models that can foster learning as a systemic continuous process and collective interaction between work, organisation, and technology make it possible to exploit its potential, as well as to furtherly progress along the path of technological innovation. It is therefore learning as a widespread phenomenon inherent to the new forms of work, as the foundation of direct participation in production processes (cognitive participation), that constitutes the backbone of the new season of work transformation that replaces the “story of merits and needsµ (Trentin) with a new project of emancipation of human work in terms of skills and rights. In the perspective already outlined by Giuseppe Di Vittorio, and more recently by Jacques Delors, it is learning as a collective, social phenomenon, that outlines the boundaries of the new process for strengthening and spreading freedom, meant as emancipation of those, in the world of work and in society, who are subject to the domain of production digitisation and to the governance of algorithms and big data: “a unique opportunity to restore in the person the conditions to feel fulfilled, ‘governing’ his/her workµ. This essay ends with a presentation of the group “TO-MI Innovation and Workµ and of the four essays – by, respectively, Bartezzaghi, Della Rocca, Pero, and Stark and Pais (all of whom belong to it) – that constitute the monographic section of the present issue of this journal