TY  - JOUR
T1  - Digital Taylorism and the Erosion of Professional Judgment
A1  - Peter Nilsson
A1  - Eva Johansson
A1  - Lars Andersson
JF  - Journal of Applied Organizational Systems and Behavior
JO  - J Appl Organ Syst Behav
SN  - 3108-852X
Y1  - 2023
VL  - 3
IS  - 2
DO  - 10.51847/cQxVXLnw0I
SP  - 68
EP  - 75
N2  - Digital systems translate knowledge work into data fields, modular tasks, recommendations, rankings, and auditable events. These arrangements can improve coordination and consistency, yet they may also relocate decision authority, reduce exposure to whole-task learning, and make professional responsibility dependent on procedures whose assumptions are difficult to inspect. This Critical Viewpoint Article argues that the problem is not a simple restoration of classical Taylorism, but a conditional recombination of standardization, adaptive computation, metric visibility, and distributed accountability. It develops the proposed Expertise–Discretion Preservation Architecture, connecting four risk domains: digital standardization and task decomposition, skill narrowing and procedural dependency, metric control and professional judgment, and organizational consequences of deskilling. The central mechanism is a cross-level capability pathway: when decomposition restricts learning exposure, opacity redistributes knowledge, and metrics acquire authority without corresponding accountability, local efficiency may coexist with weakened capacities to diagnose, challenge, recover, and improve work systems. The article advances four normative decision principles: capability continuity, bounded delegation, consequential contestability, and accountable authority. These principles are not presented as a validated causal model, universal prescription, or implementation-ready framework. Alternative explanations include augmentation, improved consistency, worker adaptation, task fit, and occupationally specific enactment. Testing requires longitudinal, comparative, and multilevel research that separates formal system design from enacted practice, individual experience from organizational outcomes, and technological capability from legitimate authority. The contribution is a bounded vocabulary and governance-oriented synthesis for examining when digital coordination supports expertise and when it may progressively hollow it out.
UR  - https://apsshs.com/article/digital-taylorism-and-the-erosion-of-professional-judgment-oeucg9h7fnjajno
ER  -