Socio-Technical Adoption Framework for Operator 5.0

This paper develops and provides an ex-ante evaluation of the Socio-Technical Adoption Framework for Operator 5.0 (STAF-Op 5.0), a multi-level socio-technical construct system that structures adoption conditions and cross-level dependencies for implementing and scaling human-centric manufacturing technologies.

The framework was developed abductively as a structured design artefact and evaluated through structured expert review with manufacturing and Industry 4.0/5.0 specialists, combining content-validity ratings and qualitative feedback to refine constructs, level anchoring, and cross-level relations.

The framework separates socio-technical adoption conditions from staging and assessment routines, clarifies how adoption bottlenecks propagate across organisational levels, and provides a structured basis for managing Operator 5.0 technology deployment in manufacturing systems. Experts confirmed levelled construct relevance and clarity and acknowledged the need for explicit vertical relations to diagnose cross-level constraints that hinder stabilisation and scaling beyond pilot projects.

The framework offers an explicit socio-technical adoption overlay for Operator 5.0 that integrates fragmented Industry 5.0 evidence into a coherent multi-level dependency logic, enabling technology-specific solutions to be managed without reducing adoption to isolated tool selection.

The framework provides a readiness diagnostic checklist across four organisational levels, a sequencing logic that is intended to support identification of cross-level misalignment before scale-up, and a governance structure linking workstation interventions to factory-level data, strategy, and ecosystem conditions. This enables structured management of human-centric manufacturing technologies for Operator 5.0 rather than isolated implementation of solutions.