Risks,possibilities, and social relations in the computerisation of Swedish university administration

This mixed methods case study discusses how the introduction of new technology changed the work of departmental administrators at a Swedish university, drawing on Cockburn's theories on gender and technology, viewing organisations as fields of contestation. This paper argues that jobs seem more fragmented with less discretion, as a result of computerisation. However, time saved by a new division of labour enabled by digitalisation has increased the possibilities for specialisation and job crafting. This new division of labour also led to increased tensions between academics, administrators and management. As the risks and possibilities connected to computerisation are matters of social relations, as much as being governed by technology, this paper adds to the debates on work and technology by exploring the complexity of social relations at work place level experienced by this overlooked group at the periphery of the managerial and academic power centres in academia.     

Impact of sales force automation on technology-related stress, effort, and technology usage among salespeople

This study unveils factors affecting sales force automation (SFA) technology usage by salespeople. It differs from previous research by: (1) proposing a model that examines the consequences of task complexity on role perceptions and technology usage, and (2) understanding the negative repercussions of SFA technology on the user. The proposed model was tested using data from 150 salespeople employed by a national organization. The results suggest that integration of SFA technology induces adverse role perceptions in salespeople. However, controlling for extraneous variables, effort is significantly related to salespeople's usage of technology. Key managerial implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Work and Volunteering: Longitudinal Relationships between Work‐Related Experiences and Volunteering Behaviour

This study examines the effect of work‐related experiences on employees’ engagement in community volunteering, using data from a British longitudinal panel of employees. Using a novel analytical approach that separates variation in volunteering due to within‐person changes in work conditions from variation due to between‐person work differences, we more robustly test existing and new hypotheses about the effects of work on volunteering. New to this literature, we find that commuting and satisfaction with job experiences are significant predictors of community volunteering, both the likelihood to volunteer and volunteering frequency. In turn, volunteering determinants previously explored with cross‐sectional data, such as managerial and professional jobs, employment sector and hourly paid contracts, are no longer statistically significant in the within‐person models. We discuss a number of important theoretical and practical consequences of these findings.     

Managerial perceptions of sales training and performance

This study examines managerial perceptions of the impact sales training has on sales force performance among 46 multinational and 59 national firms in Malaysia. The results demonstrate that, unlike their national counterparts, multinational firm sales managers perceived greater improvement in all five hypothesized measures of performance: company information and policies, sales presentation and communications skills, sales objectives, product information and technical skills, and customer relation skills, as a result of their sales force completing initial sales training. The study concludes with managerial implications of the findings and suggestions for future research.     

The Relationship between Delegation and Incentives Across Occupations: Evidence and Theory

A large literature suggests that incentive pay and delegation of worker authority are positively related. Using data from a large cross section of British establishments, we show that the positive relationship found in the empirical literature masks a stark difference across jobs. Classifying jobs into two categories (complex jobs, including professional, technical and scientific occupations, and simple jobs, consisting of all other non‐managerial occupations) we find a positive relationship for simple jobs and a negative relationship for complex jobs. To explain this negative relationship, we develop a model where stronger incentives distort a worker's decisions towards low risk‐return tasks.     

Learning Technological Concepts and Developing Intellectual Skills

The increasing complexity of work and social life demands that people possess conceptual understanding and intellectual skills in order to gain the desired level of competence. Unfortunately, the development of high level cognitive skills is a complex task that has not been sufficiently addressed in education. This chapter discusses the nature of intellectual skills and identifies numerous problems that educators face when they attempt to emphasize these skills in their curriculum. Through a comparison of the characteristics of formal and informal learning environments, the author identifies four elements of informal learning that guide the creation of high level intellectual skills. Incorporating the four elements of informal learning in formal instruction can lead to robust opportunities for students to gain conceptual understanding and develop their intellectual skills.     

Articulation work from the middle—a study of how technicians mediate users and technology

This article studies the work performed by technicians in a large demonstration project, EcoGrid 2.0, in the Danish island Bornholm. Based on observations of household visits conducted by technicians, we demonstrate how these act as ‘middlemen’, mediating and linking together the smart technology of the demonstration and the involved users. Formally, technicians’ work is to keep users online; however, they also perform a number of invisible tasks to keep users engaged and active. Our ethnographic study shows two broad categories of invisible work: first, technicians continually facilitate the willingness of users, recurrently affirming the social contract between users and demonstration project. Second, technicians facilitate the abilities of users by improvising informal training sessions of how to operate the system. These findings are used to discuss the importance of invisible articulation work of technical service workers in large scale real‐world experiments.     

Clerical workers, clerical skills: case studies from credit management

This article examines job knowledge and skill in clerical work drawing on five case studies from the area of credit management. The cognitive, social and 'tacit' skills necessary for clerical effectiveness in this sector are identified and examined. Feminist approaches to skills analysis are used to examine how and why this type of work is under-valued.     

The role of ICTs in the servitisation and degradation of IT professional work

Recently IT work has been subjected to management approaches that apply production methods to service work. Specialised information and communication technologies (ICTs) used by IT professionals have played an important role in this ‘service turn’, but this has not been adequately explored in the literature. Via a qualitative study of IT professionals situated across the servitised IT functions of five UK‐based organisations, this article considers how these ICTs are inscribed with managerial logics that afford control benefits to managers while undermining professional autonomy and job quality. The article makes two main contributions to the literature. Firstly, it sheds light on how ICTs introduced into organisational IT functions support managerial control objectives and impact the job quality of IT professionals. Secondly, it suggests that ICTs may infect the logic of professionalism that takes pride in the quality of the work performance with a dominant managerial logic that places an emphasis on meeting management objectives.     

Learning to labour: an evaluation of internships and employability in the ICT sector

The employability of graduates is often reduced to lists of de‐contextualised skills that graduates may or may not have and which may or may not translate to prized graduate positions. Recently, internships have become the way in which graduates acquire and demonstrate work‐readiness to potential employers. This article examines a particular type of internship in the ICT sector, namely placements incorporated in degree education. The findings suggest that while internships can enhance employability and indeed be a mechanism for accessing permanent jobs, more often, instead of ‘learning to labour’, interns are expected to be productive workers. A mini labour market operates at the undergraduate level that advantages those already possessed of the required soft skills. The emphasis on soft skills signals a shift in the nature of ICT work with attendant implications for education of workers in this sector, revealed by anchoring employability to particular labour process(es).     

Discretionary technology bootlegging tensions in institutional healthcare work

We explore individuals who take some of their technology use ‘underground’, described as ‘bootlegging’, to enhance healthcare work. We find that healthcare professionals’ informal use of mobile applications in healthcare work sometimes ‘sticks out’ and this produces professional identity tensions: (1) conflict with perceptions of professional behaviour, and (2) defilement of expert judgment. Our analysis, moreover, reveals that identity work (i.e. ‘accepting’ and ‘sensemaking’) provides a coping mechanism to deal with these unresolved professional identity tensions. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the constitutive entanglements and two‐way interactions of discretionary technology bootlegging, professional identity and autonomy in institutional healthcare work.     

Re-examining technology's destruction of blue-collar work

Despite research suggesting certain death of blue-collar work due to technological advancements, blue-collar jobs continue to be in demand. Through a study of the blue-collar dominant Transport and Logistics sector in Australia, we apply a Critical Realist framework to consider the tendencies contributing to, and limiting, technological uptake and worker displacement. Our analysis of interviews with sector managers demonstrate how technological uptake decisions to enact labour saving technologies are often constrained by other causal mechanisms and associated (counter) tendencies. Causal mechanisms related to geographical artifacts, industry structure and established business models, along with class structure, mitigate against ‘big bang’ technological transformation and the demise of blue-collar work. We conclude that tracking the future of work is important, but it cannot be done solely on the basis of technological capacities to displace labour or without consideration of the complex interplay of causal mechanisms and tendencies shaping employer decisions about technology.     

Permanent Jobs,Employment Protection,and Job Content

Using Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data for twenty‐one countries, I study the impact of employment protection laws (EPL) on job content. I find that workers’ use of influence, reading, writing, planning, numeracy and information and computer technology skills, and their task discretion, were higher in permanent than in temporary jobs. Moreover, stricter EPL on permanent jobs raised the gap in job content for influence, reading, writing, and planning skills used in permanent jobs versus temporary jobs.     

How information and communication technology drives (routine and non-routine) jobs: Structural path and decomposition analysis for China

A comprehensive exploration into the routine/non-routine job implications of information and communication technology (ICT) is crucial for tackling routine-replacing technological change challenges in the digital era. To this end, we propose an integrated input-output (IO) analytical framework to detangle the intertwined relations between ICT and non-ICT sectors, and further incorporate structural path analysis (SPA) and structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to examine the extent to which and how ICT sub-sectors drive the formations and changes of embodied routine/non-routine jobs in ICT. An empirical study using China's national IO tables from World Input-Output Database and the matched occupational employment data derived from 2000 and 2010 Population Census is conducted. We find that China's ICT growth over 2000–2010 has not led to a decline in jobs, which still holds true for both ICT manufacturing and ICT service, as well as for routine/non-routine jobs. We also find an increase in the embodied employment share of non-routine relative to routine jobs. The typical paths “source sector → (intermediate sector) → ICT final demand” generate many routine/non-routine jobs, which are primarily lied in the zero and first rounds. The decomposition results show that the declining sectoral routine/non-routine job coefficients drives the decline of both ICT embodied routine and non-routine jobs (especially the former), which is completely offset by the rising final demand of ICT. The proposed integrated IO analytical framework could also be applied to other indicators and extended to multi-country/region analysis.     

New social relations of digital technology and the future of work: Beyond technological determinism

This introduction sets out the context for the Special Issue and offers an in-depth reflection on key themes addressed by our contributors. The Special Issue aims to place the social relations of production at the centre of debates about technology and the future of work, and create space for greater critical reflection on what it means to go ‘beyond technological determinism’. We identify ways in which aspects of technological determinism continue to influence debates on technology, the labour process and industrial relations, despite efforts to reject it. We argue that this influence is manifested in some persistent problems within the literature including overly rigid periodisations (such as ‘platform capitalism’), a narrow conceptual repertoire (which reifies notions like ‘algorithmic control’) and a constricted empirical focus. We elucidate the value of a social shaping of technology (SST) approach to overcome these challenges and provide a brief overview of the articles contained within the issue.     

Resource‐based strategy and managerial power in networks of internationally dispersed technology units

A linking of the Resource Based View of the firm, Resource Dependency Theory and the Vroom‐Yetton model of leadership is used to show that when important technical (R&D) resources are located offshore for strategic and efficiency reasons, resource‐based power goes with them. The extra‐national technology units that embody those strategically important resources should be managed with inclusive methods that respect that power shift. Theoretical, empirical and managerial implications are drawn from this analysis. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Women, information technology and 'waves of optimism': Australian evidence on 'mixed-skill' jobs

Optimism about the increased engagement of women in information technology employment has been informed, in part, by essentialist ideas about the suitability for women of emerging jobs combining technical with interpersonal, artistic or other 'non-technical' skills. Drawing on evidence from Australia, we highlight limitations to this brand of optimism, questioning the potential for women in mixed-skill jobs in computing and multimedia organisations.     

Black Female Clerical Workers: Movement toward Equality with White Women?

This article examines the occupational mobility patterns of black and white female clerical workers from 1972 to 1980. Black women were initially concentrated in the lower-paying clerical positions and were less likely than white women to leave for better jobs in other areas. Those black women who had relatively good clerical jobs tended not to rise any further and even experienced some difficulty in maintaining their occupational status. Education and training aided occupational mobility less for black women than for white women.     

English Language and Low‐Skilled Jobs: The Structure of Employment

We use the Bay Area Longitudinal Surveys (BALS) to examine skill requirements, the joint use of English and non‐language skills, and wages in low‐skilled jobs. Results show that low‐skilled jobs—even those open to workers with limited English—require English language skills. Furthermore, most make joint use of English and non‐language skills with the ability of any specific English skill set to enhance varying with the job’s specific non‐language skill required and industry.     

Technology sourcing and output of established firms in a regime of encompassing technological change

This paper argues that when the technological basis of an industry is changing, the firm's approach to technology sourcing plays a critical role in building the capabilities needed to generate new technical outputs. Using survey and archival data from the U.S. pharmaceutical industry during the period 1981–91, we find that different approaches to technology sourcing (internal R&D and external R&D) are related to different types of biotechnology‐based output at the end of the period. Internal R&D was positively associated with patent output. Acquisition activity was positively related to number of biotechnology‐based products. Greater use of R&D contracts and licenses was associated with stronger reputation for possessing expertise in biotechnology. These findings underscore the importance of taking a multifaceted approach to technology sourcing in order to build the absorptive capacity needed to generate new technical output. Surprisingly, we also found that involvement in joint ventures was negatively related to patent output. This raises interesting questions about the strategic use of joint ventures in a regime of encompassing technological change. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.