Journal Article

Scholars and technocrats globally continue to be concerned about the widening income gap in the micro, meso and macro levels. As global wealth creation continues to grow exponentially at the apex, there is stagnation and poverty increase at the bottom levels. Racism and poverty plague economies globally resulting in underutilization of diverse talent especially for the underserved. Additionally, global underemployment is on the increase and skilled labor demands decreases with the advent of technology and automation. As these changes take place, there will be a decrease of income streams and lower yield of economic opportunity. This paper discusses how we can prepare diverse talent for a dynamic world with continuous automation by addressing the global wealth and income disparities. We also explore options for increasing and utilizing global diverse talent especially among the underserved. Further, we discuss the future of technology and entrepreneurial innovations for the underserved and how to enhance unity in community and capacity building. This study used exploratory design to collect data from a sample of students, faculty and entrepreneurs from the both developed and emerging markets; USA, Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti. An interview guide was used to collect data from entrepreneurs and faculty while focus group discussions and interviews were held with students from Medgar Evers and Kenyatta universities. The sample was purposively selected from these countries and institutions that were convenient and reachable to the researchers. The findings revealed that economic disparities accentuated the blurred lines of poverty and had great ramifications on individuals, communities and the environment. To increase the use of global talent, institutions of higher learning need to strengthen the weak partnerships with industry players and entrepreneurs globally. It is imperative for these institutions to synergize across countries and communities so that innovations lead to market-based solutions that become new revenue streams for wealth creation. Additionally, experiential learning is essential for entrepreneur students to ensure they get the "hard knocks" of business whilst leveraging technology such as block chain, AI, virtual reality and 3 D printing. We conclude by reiterating that collaborative ventures internationally, with entrepreneurs, academics and industry players will equip nascent entrepreneurs from underserved communities will gradually slow the rise of inequalities globally.

The task approach is attracting increasing attention and recognition among scholars in economics, sociology and related fields. However, measurement still presents an important challenge to the task approach. This paper studies the comparability of task measures in the commonly used German BIBB/IAB-BIBB/BAuA employment cross-sections on qualification and working conditions from 1979, 1985/86, 1991/92, 1998/99, and 2006. We hypothesize that findings on task-biased technological change are sensitive to variable choice. The task data differ substantially from other task data, and task items are not readily comparable between survey years. As a result, classifying single task items into distinct domains leads to a number of problems. To test our hypothesis, we use different strategies for classifying tasks into task domains and analyze whether different operationalizations lead to different conclusions about task change in Germany. Our results show that this indeed is the case. Our paper provides readers with a broader understanding of German task data and gives recommendations for applying the task approach to German employment data.

To investigate the Work Ability Index (WAI) as tool for identifying workers at risk of premature work exit in terms of disability pension, unemployment, or early retirement. Prospective cohort study of 11,537 male construction workers (mean age 45.5 years), who completed the WAI at baseline and reported their work status (employed, unemployed, disability pension, or retired) after mean 2.3 years of follow-up. Associations between WAI scores and work status were investigated by multinomial logistic regression analysis. The ability of the WAI to discriminate between workers at high and low risk of premature work exit was analyzed by the area (AUC) under the receiver operating characteristic curve. 9,530 (83 %) construction workers had complete data for analysis. At follow-up, 336 (4 %) workers reported disability pension, 125 (1 %) unemployment, and 255 (3 %) retirement. WAI scores were prospectively associated with the risk of disability pension at follow-up, but not with the risk of unemployment and early retirement. The WAI showed fair discrimination to identify workers at risk of disability pension [AUC = 0.74; 95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.70-0.77]. The discriminative ability decreased with age from AUC = 0.78 in workers aged 30-39 years to AUC = 0.69 in workers ≥50 years of age. Discrimination failed for unemployment (AUC = 0.51; 95 % CI 0.47-0.55) and early retirement (AUC = 0.58; 95 % CI 0.53-0.61). The WAI can be used to identify construction workers <50 years of age at increased risk of disability pension and invite them for preventive interventions.

This article uses textbooks and advertisements to explore the formal and informal ways in which people were introduced to vertical filing in the early twentieth century. Through the privileging of "system" an ideal mode of paperwork emerged in which a clerk could " grasp " information simply by hand without having to understand or comprehend its content. A file clerk's hands and fingers became central to the representation and teaching of filing. In this way, filing offered an example of a distinctly modern form of information work. Filing textbooks sought to enhance dexterity as the rapid handling of paper came to represent information as something that existed in discrete units, in bits that could be easily extracted. Advertisements represented this mode of information work in its ideal form when they frequently erased the worker or reduced him or her to hands, as "instant" filing became "automatic" filing, with the filing cabinet presented as a machine.

I document a significant deindustrialization trend in recent decades that goes considerably beyond the advanced, post-industrial economies. The hump-shaped relationship between industrialization (measured by employment or output shares) and incomes has shifted downwards and moved closer to the origin. This means countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income compared to the experience of early industrializers. Asian countries and manufactures exporters have been largely insulated from those trends, while Latin American countries have been especially hard hit. Advanced economies have lost considerable employment (especially of the low-skill type), but they have done surprisingly well in terms of manufacturing output shares at constant prices. While these trends are not very recent, the evidence suggests both globalization and labor-saving technological progress in manufacturing have been behind these developments. The paper briefly considers some of the economic and political implications of these trends.

The emergence and convergence of four key technologically enabled phenomena (Internet Collaboration, Big |Fast| Open Data, Additive Manufacturing, and Crypto-currency) prompted the Science and Technology Options Assessment panel of the European Parliament to let a contract to conduct research into the potential of these technologies and to identify any associated policy implications. The research study comprised of four phases: desk research, a workshop, a mini-foresight exercise and interviews with industrialists and academics. The data collected were analysed and a number of positive and negative policy options were identified. The issues that arose in the study are summarised and include: personal data as commodity, disintermediation, education, prosumerism and entrepreneurial innovation, pace of policy development, (and laws and regulations), borderlessness and internationalism, virtualisation of industrial infrastructure and of currency. Given the radical changes that are expected to sweep the EU and global economies in the next few years, we found there was particular interest in developing and deploying new forms of intellectual property management protocols. It was recognised that this short study was only the start of a longer process. Future investigation needs to delve deeper into the technical and social aspects of the relevant technologies and of the capability envelope they occupy, as no one can anticipate the next technology disrupter and where it will act.

The increasing presence of artificial intelligence creates enormous challenges for human rights. Among the short-term challenges are ways in which technology engages just about all rights on the UDHR, as exemplified through use of effectively discriminatory algorithms. Medium-term challenges include changes in the nature of work that could call into question many people’s status as participants in society. In the long-term humans may have to live with machines that are intellectually and possibly morally superior, even though this is highly speculative. Artificial intelligence also gives a new relevance to moral debates that used to strike many as arcane.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to introduce the Human Resources (HR) module of the SAP suite in the Italian branch of a leading multinational pharmaceutical company. This study can be re-conducted within the interpretive tradition of information technology studies focusing on the attempt to understand and describe how software users in the HR department interpreted the enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology, how they changed their work practices and the changes that occurred in organizational discourses and meanings alongside the process. Design/methodology/approach - The case study/intervention took start with the impulse of the Italian HR department manager, who was struck by the way that the ERP system technology implementation was affecting work life of the employees in the department. This research/intervention used interviews, focus groups and internal documents as sources of data. The authors conducted and analyzed 20 narrative interviews and 3 focus groups with middle managers, and they analyzed about 120 pages of internal memos. Findings - The implementation of ERP systems is almost invariably accompanied by great expectations of increased process rationalization, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and upper managers’ discourses make large use of what Engeström et al., 2010 have called process efficiency rhetoric. But the ERP technology, most likely, will neither revolutionize management nor will it become a “complete calculation machine” that runs an entire work organization (Quattrone and Hopper, 2005, p. 731). Originality/value - The implementation of the ERP system has caused conflicts and disturbances, aggravating contradictions that already existed between activity systems and introducing new types of contradictions. Pre-existent contradictions become clearer; there is a stronger interconnection between activity systems. The individual agents could experiment an expansion in their activities if only they will initiate a movement of expansive learning and if they are not prevented from doing so by coercive control. The natural expansion of the subjects’ scope of activity and horizons of possibilities could be sustained by the ERP technology if it is not used as a tool for domination and if the upper management does not try and separate what cannot in actuality be separated: The actors’ capabilities of improvised learning, which makes the institution of a new mode of the activity possible, and their capacity to assume collective control of the meaning and direction of the transformation of the activity. ERPs are technologies that can naturally bring transformations in the activity system and networks where they are introduced, but in some cases, they can easily and in a non reflective manner be intended as tools for oppression by the upper management.

No evidence of learning, in this case, must be provided. [...]competency assessment and meeting regulatory continuing education requirements have often been reduced to achieving compliance rather than actual learning. In education, a shockingly small number of gatekeepers determine what counts, and allowing these bottlenecks to remain will hold back the full promise of advances in access. [...]expanding and diversifying sources and mechanisms for credentialing will also be an important part of efforts to democratize education. Graham T. McMahon: In an information age, the currency of education is not information. Because we can look up guidelines more quickly than someone can tell them to us, the currency of education for clinicians now includes problem-solving, skill development, wisdom, and insight. [...]given the incredible (and incredibly expensive) R&D effort that will be needed to develop and scale personalized learning, it is unrealistic to assume that it will happen without a strong market contribution. [...]what is needed is a hybrid model of adoption that makes a distinction between public utility aspects of the system (e.g., universal access to underlying infrastructure, data, and other relevant systems) and aspects of the system where we want and expect market-based innovations to flourish.