Mario Ottaiano

Mario Michael Ottaiano is a doctoral candidate at the Chair of International Labour Relations at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg/University of the Federal Armed Forces and a research associate at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, where he is a member of the research group ‘Working with Artificial Intelligence’. Previously, Mario worked as a research associate at the WZB in the Globalisation, Work, Production (GWP) research group on the ‘Work and Qualification 2030’ project. Before that, Mario worked as a trade union secretary at the IG Metall district office in Baden-Württemberg in the Transformation team. There, he supported works council members and worked extensively on digital trends and future technologies. Mario studied for his master's degree in sociology at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, specialising in labour, industrial and economic sociology. Before completing his A-levels, Mario worked as an industrial mechanic in the black coal mining industry.

In his cumulative dissertation, he deals with the dual structural change, i.e. the digital and socio-ecological transformation of work, employees and their interest groups. Within this context, his research focuses on the perceptions of employees, works councils and trade unions as key stakeholders in dealing with new digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, but also against the backdrop of the restructuring of business models, production methods and work processes in companies.

Mario Michael Ottaiano focuses on different working environments (e.g. industrial production environments, but also office areas) and, consequently, different qualification levels (skilled workers in the blue-collar sector, but also highly qualified workers in the white-collar sector) as well as the different operational levels at which the two aforementioned transformations take place and are perceived and shaped from the perspective of employees, their interest groups, but also from the perspective of management representatives.

Key concepts in the sociology of work that he focuses on are the connection between “technology and experiential knowledge”, “participation and recognition” in technologically induced change processes, and the “transformation of negotiation and co-determination processes”.

Mario Michael Ottaiano conducts research on:

• (generative) artificial intelligence and work
• technologically induced change in experiential knowledge and employment 
• the digital transformation of skilled blue-collar and white-collar work 
• the role and practice of works councils and trade unions in digital and socio-ecological transformation processes
• the transformation of workplace negotiation and co-determination processes
• the function of future-oriented and social collective agreements in the context of german industrial relations