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ICT, Productivity and Organizational Complementarit

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Emerging Themes in Information Systems and Organization Studies

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a surge in interest in Information Technology (IT) and its impact on productivity. The paper presents the analysis of the literature that has analyzed how firms’ skills and organizational change affect the returns from investments in ICT. According to the skill-biased technical change (SBTC) hypothesis technological change, and particularly the adoption of ICTs, increases the demand for skilled labour with respect to unskilled labour and leads to increasing wage inequality. On the contrary the skill-biased organizational change hypothesis (SBOC) sustains that the adoption of new organizational systems based on decentralized decision-making and delayering calls for more skilled people. Because of the complementarity between new organizational systems and skilled labour firms that adopt the two complements are expected to outperform firms that use only one of them. However SBTC and SBOC hypotheses are the two sides of the same coin. Drawing on the mixed empirical evidence reported in studies that have tried to test the SBTC, literature has introduced the concept of organizational complementarity between ICT and skilled labour. In this perspective, technological and organizational change together call for more skilled labour.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Strategie aziendali, Seconda università di Napoli, Naples, Italy

    Marcello Martinez

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  1. Marcello Martinez
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Correspondence to Marcello Martinez .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Aarhus School of Business, Haslegaardsvej 10, Aarhus, 82100, Denmark

    Andrea Carugati

  2. Via dell' Artigliere 19, Verona, 37129, Italy

    Cecilia Rossignoli

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Martinez, M. (2011). ICT, Productivity and Organizational Complementarit. In: Carugati, A., Rossignoli, C. (eds) Emerging Themes in Information Systems and Organization Studies. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2739-2_21

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