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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Information And Communications Technologies, Coordination And Control, And The Distribution Of Income, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Information And Communications Technologies, Coordination And Control, And The Distribution Of Income, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Economics Department Working Paper Series
We consider the links between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the distribution of income, as mediated by problems of coordination and control within organizations. In the large corporations of the mid-twentieth century, a highly developed division of labor was coordinated and controlled with the aid of relatively underdeveloped ICTs. This created a situation in which the options of top management were constrained while the individual and collective power of lower paid workers was enhanced. Only in the late twentieth century, when the microprocessor and related technologies transformed the information systems of organizations, did improvements in the tools of coordination …
Power, Productivity And Profits, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Power, Productivity And Profits, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Economics Department Working Paper Series
New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been .power- biased.: in many industries they have allowed firms to monitor workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that .power- biased technical change’ in this sense may generate rising inequality accompanied by an increase in both unemployment and work intensity.