06 December 2017
Professor Anthony Elliott and his team at UniSA have been awarded a 2018 ARC Discovery Project for research titled “Industry 4.0 ecosystems: a comparative analysis of work-life transformation”. The project will investigate the development of workplace culture in advanced manufacturing by conceptualizing the impact of information and communication technologies on employment and mobility.
This new project examining the culture of advanced manufacturing adds a new dimension to research currently already underway at the Hawke EU Centre conducted by Professor Elliott and his research team - including Emeritus Professor Robert Holton, Professor Mike Innes, Dr Ross Boyd, Dr Eric Hsu, Dr Louis Everuss and Ms Mikako Suzuki. The team has been examining the global impacts of the digital revolution with particular focus on robotics and artificial intelligence, and have already won significant funding from the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Program through the European Commission, the Toyota Foundation in Japan, and the Australian Research Council.
Under the terms of this new ARC Award, Professor Elliott’s team will generate powerful understandings of how digital technology transforms social relations in the advanced manufacturing workplace. This will reveal the impacts of digital mobility, and potential work-life consequences. Expected outcomes include an integrated understanding of new mobile employment permutations, knowledge about how to adapt to global workplace change and otherwise cope with dynamic digital skills retraining, and the development of world-class research capacity in Australia.
The project will create ground-breaking social science platforms for capturing employment and mobility transformations in advanced manufacturing. The result is an integrated approach to understanding how digital technology reshapes employment, retraining, mobility and work-life balance. The project will contribute to improved understanding of factors that facilitate or hamper mobility in the workplace, and the development of more effective policy responses in employment, education and training.
Professor Elliott’s team were one of 594 projects to receive funding out of 3136 total applications, with a total of $225.6 million in funding was awarded through the 2018 ARC Discovery Projects scheme.
