Technological and Organizational Change and the Careers of Workers (original) (raw)
Related papers
2003
A burgeoning literature on "skill-biased" technological change (SBTC) reveals that investment in information and communications technology (ICT) is associated with workforce reductions and an increase in the demand for highly educated workers. Based on extensions of the neo-classical paradigm, researchers have also come to realize that the implementation of a new technology is often accompanied by organizational change. Two edited volumes by Marco Vivarelli, Mario Pianta, Pascal Petit, and Luc Soete provide important new evidence on the policy implications of these trends. We review these volumes and other recent studies and also provide new evidence on the relationship between technological change and organizational change, based on a comprehensive dataset of Italian manufacturing firms.
Technological Change , Training , and Job Tasks in a High-Tech Industry
2000
Using data from 23 semiconductor plants, we study how automation of information handling and material handling affects development, use, and compensation of skills. Information handling automation is skill-biased technical change using relatively more technicians and engineers. It widens the skill gap across occupations, and it goes with higher initial wages for all employees and shorter career ladders for engineers. Material handling automation also widens the skill gap, but goes with employment of relatively more operators and with lower pay across all occupations. Overall, technological change goes with higher demand for skilled workers, decreased training, and deskilling of low-skill jobs and up-skilling of high-skill jobs coupled with little change in compensation structures except for a flattening of career ladders for engineers. Our findings that technological change has negative impacts on labor market outcomes for all skill groups should concern us about the outlook for emp...
Implications of Technology Development on the Labor Market
LIMEN - International Scientific-Business Conference - Leadership, Innovation, Management and Economics: Integrated Politics of Research
The level of resources invested in STEM, innovation and R&D has never been higher, resulting in new technologies that are promising higher return rates and a new competitive edge. Technology development is influencing the way the work is performed, thus changing the structure of the organization, content of work and demand for workers` skills. Thus, technology development changes industries, organizations and occupations. When occupations are displaced, many workers are forced to reconsider their possibilities at the labor market and to broaden their job perspectives by upgrading their skills portfolio. At the same time, due to the increase in production productivity, new products and services are offered, and new markets emerge. Thus, new jobs are instated and new skills for performing them are required. Technology development led by automation (including AI, ML, etc) and digitalization have found creative and efficient ways to change traditional business models, not necessarily ...
Older workers’ employment in dynamic technology changes
The Journal of Socio-Economics, 2009
Discrimination against older workers and the higher barriers for entrance to the workforce that these workers face are well documented in the literature. This situation becomes even worse when technological changes take place. In this paper the different responses of younger and older workers to those technological changes were analyzed, and it was revealed that older workers can be severely harmed when such changes occur. It was found that providing a subsidy for older workers could aid in reducing the unemployment among older workers, together with increasing growth of the economy and decreasing the inequality of income distribution.
Technical Change and Employment: a Twofold Critique
… on Technology, Economic Integration and Social …, 1996
The relationship between technology and employment tends to be neglected by economic literature, being technical change generally taken as exogenous and unemployment generally studied as a short-term phenomenon rather than a structural problem. Nevertheless, classical economists put forward the so called "compensation theory", which is still the main reference of current literature. This theory studies different price and income effects which -together with product innovation -should assure a complete compensation of initial labour displacement due to labour-saving innovation. This theory is here analyzed and criticized taking into account the critique to Say's Law, current models in non-neoclassical economics and contemporary theories dealing with technological change and structural dynamics. On the other hand, a second orthodoxy has recently developed outside academic economics: this is the so called "end of work" literature which is very influential in current debate and public opinion. In this paper this point of view is also criticized, the general conclusion being that this framework is based on unacceptable generalizations and on simplistic undervaluation of indirect (compensation) effects of technical change. Dealing with both "orthodoxies" the author comes to the conclusion that a rigorous approach cannot be based on ex-ante beliefs. On the contrary, attention has to be turned to aggregate historical evidences. Employment and working-time evolutions over the period 1960-1994 in the G-4 are analyzed in the final part of the work. Interestingly enough, nothwithstanding the catastrophical picture drawn by some American "computopians", U.S. has demonstrated an obvious capacity of creating new jobs; on the opposite, in spite of the optimistic beliefs of some European labour economists, the total amount of work in the two examined European countries has slowly shrinked.
Technical Progress and Early Retirement*
The Economic Journal, 2011
This paper claims that technical progress induces early retirement of older workers. Technical progress erodes technology specific human capital. Since older workers have shorter career horizons, there is less incentive for them or for their employers to invest in learning how to use the new technologies. Consequently, they are more likely to stop working. We call this effect the erosion effect. Since technical progress also raises wages in the economy as a whole and since technical progress is positively correlated across sectors, this presents an opposite effect of technical progress, which we call the wage effect. Using individual and sector data, we separate the two effects and find support for our theory.
2022
Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) ask whether vulnerability to automation, measured by task content, can rationalize employment trends. We invert their approach, asking what technological changes best explain skill-content and employment changes. We combine a tractable GE model with three editions of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses, and March Current Population Surveys to estimate changes in the relative productivity of skills. We conclude that finger-dexterity productivity grew rapidly while abstract-skill productivity lagged, a form of ‘skill bias’. Together with substitutability between abstract and routine inputs, these results explain changes in skill use within occupations. ∗This research was funded in part under NSF grant SES-1851636. We gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions from participants in the NBER Personnel group, Brigham Young University, George Washington University, the Gilbert Memorial Lecture at the University o...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
A large literature has documented occupational shifts in the US away from routine intensive tasks. Theories of skill-biased technological change differ in whether they predict changes in occupational mix within firms, or merely across different firms or industries. Using LinkedIn resume records, BLS OES data, and Compustat employee counts, we estimate occupational employment for publicly traded US firms from 2000 through 2016. We find that faster employment growth among firms that disproportionately employ non-routine workers is the most important cause of SBTC, followed by within firm occupational mix rebalancing. The entry of new firms also plays a role, although firm exit is slightly routine-worker biased. R&D leads firms to have a larger share of routine workers. These results are most consistent with a theory of routine task demand reduction caused by the diffusion of infra-marginally implemented new technologies. We also introduce a new measure of business labor dynamism, capturing the frequency with which firms change their occupational mix. Consistent with trends in productivity and other measures of business and labor market dynamism, this measure has decreased steadily since 2000.
The Impact of Technological Change
Wiley Series in Software Radio
The first part of this report examines the relationship of technological change to employment and work. After a L.-ief introduction, chapter 1 discusses new technology and labor productivity versus employment, emphasizing the effects of labor-saving machinery and changes in specific sectors of employment, such as electrical machinery, communications services, financial services, printing and publishing, and textiles and clothing. Chapter 2 looks at the effects of technological change on occupational structure and skills. Chapter 3 concerns coping with the effects of technological change on employment. The second part of the report looks at training for new technology. After an introduction, chapter 4 examines the issues involved in training under conditions of change and uncertainty. Chapter 5 discusses apprenticeship, project work, and "sandwich" courses that combine school-based programs with hands-on training. Chapter 6 gives a brief overview of four in-house training programs at Avionics, Corning Glass, Motorola, and Siemens. Chapter 7 gives an overview of technology training institutions that provide similar services for small and medium-sized companies in CONTENTS u PART 1 TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE. EMPLOYMENT AND WORK 10 Electrical machinery vs. overall engineering Postal and telecommunications services Financial services 12 Printing and publishing 12 Textiles and clothing 13 CHAPTER II. EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE ON OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE AND SKILLS 17 CHAPTER III. COPING WITH THE EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE 19 Redeployment and related measures at firm level 21 Labour flexibility 22 Flexibility vs. security of employment: Striking a balance 23 Sharing the cost of the adjustment to technological change 24 Collective agreements and legislation on technological change and security of employment 24 Aims of training policies and programmes 25