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The purpose of this study is to explore how Industry 4.0 (I40) technologies support workers' engagement in soft total quality management (TQM) practices for organisational performance.

The authors conducted a multiple case study of six Italian manufacturing organisations that operate with I40 production and implement TQM practices. The authors concentrated on the relationship between I40 technologies and soft TQM aspects.

I40 technologies provide two forms of engagement with workers. Workers can act as machine supervisors and expert assembly operators. Organisations use five soft TQM practices to involve and develop workers for TQM that vary according to automation levels. The five soft TQM practices are top management design around workers, incremental trials with I40 technologies, worker empowerment, I40 sociotechnical collaboration and individual feedback systems.

In the literature that focusses primarily on how I40 technologies support the hard side of TQM by creating a data-driven and automated quality management system, the authors illustrate how the workforce can be engaged in I40 with five soft TQM practices to improve organisational performance. Thus, the authors complement the theory of hard and soft TQM aspects for I40 production systems.

This paper uses dialectical inquiry to explore tensions that arise when adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and their reconciliation mechanisms.

We conducted an in-depth qualitative case study over a 3-year period on an Italian division of an international electrotechnical organisation that produces electrical switches. This organisation successfully adopted Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. The study is based on primary data such as observations and semi-structured interviews, along with secondary data.

We identify four empirically validated dialectic tensions arising across different Industry 4.0 adoption stages due to managers’ and workers’ contrasting interpretations of technologies. Consequently, we define the related reconciliation mechanisms that allow the effective adoption of various Industry 4.0 technologies to support a lean production system.

This is the first empirical investigation of tensions in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. Furthermore, the paper presents four theoretical propositions and a conceptual model describing which tensions arise during the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and the reconciliation mechanisms that prevent lean production system deterioration.

The aim of this study is to describe the context, the activity, and the outcome of a project, which led to the creation of ArcheoTRAC, the first information system (IS) designed to run all the daily activities in archaeological finds management, to share information among the different professionals and to support in this way knowledge creation.

The study focuses on the ArcheoTRAC system and on the project that contributed to its development. Since the authors of this paper have been involved in the project (one of them since its very beginning), an action research paradigm has been used to derive scientific knowledge out of the experience. Both organizational and technological aspects are investigated under the respective theoretical knowledge management perspectives.

There were two effective choices in order to foster knowledge sharing in a context of a scarcity of interactions among professionals involved. Grouping representatives of possible users in the project contributed to create a mutual understanding of their interdependent and complementary needs and activities. Moreover, some system features of the ArcheoTRAC system (views, fields and thesauri customization, non‐prescriptive workflows) were effective in letting each user adapt him/herself to the new system.

The study sheds light on the characteristics of a system designed in order to maximize the information exploitation and sharing and, at the same time, to minimize the introduction impact, in a context denoted by manual processes, lack of habit of cooperation, and poor IT literacy.

The study deals with an innovative IS that supports all activities performed by every professional involved in archaeological finds management. The study describes the architecture of this IS that has been designed to minimize impacts on professionals' behaviour and maximize knowledge sharing.