Since the organization of the sugar cane plantations, industrial processes have colonized not only the model of manufacturing production, but also logistics, bio-objects, and the digital world. The common statement describing the service and digital societies as post-industrial ones is weakened by the continuous expansion of industrial processes where the know-how to make things, people, processes, more scalable and more profitable. In the STS literature, industries have been much more discussed regarding their role in risk and pollution than regarding their specific regimes of constitution and perpetuation. This panel intends dealing with contemporary industrial processes through a twofold questioning: 1/ How scalability can be studied in the making? What kind of knowledge are produced to make things and tasks scalable? How do industrial processes articulate initial projects, international norms and cost evaluation? What does it do to the objects, to persons and spaces that are absorbed in those processes? 2/ How do industries define themselves across time? How economic interests emerge? How techno-industrial assemblages are reshaped through critical moments? Being an industry is not as obvious that it may be, it requires a process of self-definition, collective identification, political representation, that can’t be taken for granted. The ability to identify what are the core and might shift across time to preserve the industry facing controversies. This panel invites empirical and theoretical papers that document or help to answer to one or more of these questions.