Nathalie Greenan & Sylvia Napolitano, CNAM, Presentation at GLO (Global Labour Organisation) Workshop: Technological Change, Employment and Skills, June 7, 2021

1. Why do employees participate in innovation?
Skills and organisational design issues and the ongoing
technological transformation
Nathalie Greenan, CNAM CEET, TEPP and GLO
Sylvia Napolitano, CNAM CEET
Workshop: Technological Change, Employment and Skills
June 7, 2021

2. Introduction
What is the ongoing technological transformation?
• A stage in a technological revolution that started around 1970 with the
invention of the microprocessor allowing to enter the age of Information and
telecommunications (Perez, 2002)
fifth technological revolution
• The third acceleration phase of this wave of technological innovations based on
information and communication technologies
1980: Personal Computer; 1990: Internet; 2010: Data
• Development of government programs, supported by the engineering
community around the idea that Industry 4.0 is likely to revitalise
manufacturing
IoT, machine learning, AI, robots, big data, 3D printing,

3. Introduction
In the economic literature, technological change is often described as an exogenous shock with a
determinist impact on …
• …productivity, in particular in presence of a general purpose technology
• …structure of jobs, tasks’ content of jobs, skills needs
• …employment preserving macro adjustments
This view is shared by the engineering community that focuses on the optimisation of the technical
properties of equipment, assuming that…
• …it drives economic performance
• …the substitution of the human by the machine is the best solution
Empirical results show however …
• …ambiguous productivity effects
• …a great diversity in jobs redesign and within sector job restructuring
• …no automaticity of compensation mechanisms at the macro level
This calls for moving away from a techno-centric approach by questioning the choice set of actors
within organisations
• main issue of our chapter in the Handbook

4. Technological change is socially determined
There is an increase in the innovation intensity of technology…
…but technology uses are determined by social processes within
organisations which happen at slower pace
• Inertial forces within organisations
• long process of genesis and stabilisation of uses that displace the technological
frontier
• An emerging phenomenon is not always a revolution
• The content of work is changing slowly
• Organisations moderate the disruptive nature of innovation

5. Technological change is socially determined
Organisational change is more gradual than technological change
• Organisational change simultaneously concerns management tools, organisational
structures, work practices and skills sets (Greenan, 2003)
• Concept of productive complementarities captures the idea that tangible and non-
tangible investments reinforce the performance of one another in the change process
(Milgrom and Roberts 1990)  calls for radical changes
• but the inertia of routines and trade-off in organisational design between the old
and new system is likely to slow down the organisational transformation
 Co-evolution rather than complementarity (Kay et al. 2018)
We need to understand how organisations take advantage of new opportunities
opened by high paced technological change
• High skill endowments are a likely moderator
 lead to faster implementation of new technologies and increase the absorption of externally
available knowledge (Piva and Vivarelli, 2009)
• Design adaptive organisational forms

6. Adaptive organisational forms
Stable organisational structure with dynamic properties
• Strikes the right balance in a number of trade-offs
 new opportunities/change vs established practices/continuity;
 Exploration/innovation vs exploitation/standardisation;
 flexibility/agility vs productivity improvements/cost reductions;
 creativity vs control
An hypothesis in the strategic management literature (Adler et al., 2009)
• In the 1990s up to the great recession, ICTs together with management tools
targeting the optimisation of business processes up and down the value chain have
favoured exploitation rather than exploration
 To take full advantage of the new opportunities related with digital technologies a new
balance needs to be found toward more exploration

8. Adaptive organisational forms
Digital technologies are likely to be game changers by…
• opening the boundaries of organisations
• changing the locus of innovation from within the organisation to its boundaries
A main issue at stake in the ongoing technological transformation is related to
the work environment …
• to how it contributes to committing employees and self employed to share their
knowledge and new ideas with co-workers and partners
• Knowledge management issue in networks (Bodrožić and Adler, 2018) )
• Need for organisations to manage the participation constraint of individuals to
organisational change and innovation within and across the boundaries of the
organisation

9. A research agenda
Address the work experience of employees facing organisational
change in increasingly turbulent organisational environment
• Literature on high performance work organisation
 Industrial relations
 Biased towards exploitation
• Literature on innovative work practices
 Organisational psychology
 Management strategy
 Accounting and management control literature on creativity and control
 Small but growing literature on organisational and HRM practices that favour
innovative work practices (Laursen and Foss, 2003, Bos-Nehles at al., 2017)
• Literature on new technologies and work activity
 Ergonomics
 Human relations and organisation science
 Work psychology

10. A research agenda
Different ways to approach this issue
• At the workstation level
 Analysis of the paradoxical experience of technology
 Build collaboration between engineering sciences and social science on technological projects at their
design stage
 Call for paper of Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations on Experience the duality of digital
technologies by crossing disciplinary perspectives (deadline January 2022)
• At the company level
 Analyse linked employer/employee datasets on the dynamics of organisations and work
 Meadow project – surveys in Finland, Denmark, Luxembourg – European Company Survey
 Design new questions to approach organisational practices that equip relationships within networks
in global value chains
• At the macro level
 Link employer level surveys on technological progress and innovation with employee level surveys on
work organisation and working conditions
 Beyond 4.0 H2020 project
• Anonymization strategies of public data are a main obstacle
• Development of the platform economy transforms the employer/employee relationship

11. Thank you for your attention!