Non-compliance at work: Workarounds and inefficiencies in the ‘smart’ factory

Drawing on 68 semi-structured interviews with assembly-line workers and other informants, this article examines workers’ non-compliant behaviour in an Italian manufacturing company. Our research underscores that workers engage in non-compliance not to defy managerial authority, but to respond to management-created inefficiencies stemming from excessive standardization and cost-cutting. We argue that this behaviour cannot be adequately accounted for through the dominant conceptions of non-compliant behaviour at work such as organizational misbehaviour and games, and can be better understood via the concept of ‘workaround’ developed in the information systems literature. By combining insights from industrial sociology, labour process theory and information systems literature, this article makes an original contribution to the sociological understanding of workers’ non-compliant behaviour and its connection to organizational inefficiencies. Our findings also shed light on the enduring importance of workers’ creative input even in highly automatable jobs, challenging techno-centric narratives of the future of work.