Journal Article

This article assesses the effect of computer‐based technologies on employment in Australia. We find that: (i) the total amount of work available has not decreased following the introduction of computer‐based technologies; and (ii) the pace of structural change and job turnover in the labour market has not accelerated with the increasing application of computer‐based technologies. A review of recent studies that claim computer‐based technologies may be about to cause widespread job destruction establishes several major flaws with these predictions. Our suggested explanation for why techno‐phobia has such a grip on popular imagination is a human bias to believe that ‘we live in special times’.

The main question that guides this paper is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence building (education, training and skills) when designing and implementing innovation policies. After a brief literature review, this paper suggests a typology of internal/external and individual/organizational sources of competences that are related to innovation activities. This serves to examine briefly the most common initiatives that governments are taking in this regard. The paper identifies three overall deficiencies and imbalances in innovation systems in terms of education, training and skills: the insufficient levels of competences in a system, the time lag between firms’ short-term needs for specific competences and the long time required to develop them, and the imbalances between internal and external sources of competences in firms. From these, the paper elaborates a set of overall criteria for the (re)design of policy instruments addressing those tensions and imbalances.

We investigate changes in the occupation structure in Australia between 1966 and 2011, and the effect of these changes on the earnings distribution. Occupation changes exhibited job polarisation (growth in high and low skill jobs, declines in middle skill jobs) in the 1980s and 1990s and general upskilling in the 1970s and 2000s. Any job polarisation has been primarily a male phenomenon. Occupation changes were consistent with the loss of jobs that were high in routine task intensity. Changes in occupational composition and associated earnings changes contributed significantly to growth in overall earnings inequality from the mid‐1980s to the mid‐2000s.

Our contribution aims to provide a definitional model of the expert and to highlight its management related issues. We characterize the expert on cognitive and social and confront this framework to a case study. Ironically, the company studied combines an awareness of the strategic challenges posed by experts with no organized management experts. In this context, experts are building so self-organized their social and cognitive dimensions. [googletranslate_en]

Mobile working can not be simply executed "anywhere, anytime" since it also involves the meta-work to mobilize resources for its accomplishment, and to address the constraints to environmental and temporal and social contexts in which it is inserted. Although previous literature outcome of the fields of sociology of work, communication and computer-supported cooperative work has already documented some forms of meta-work, such as working articulation, no writing has addressed the features associated with digital nomad, which is an extreme form of mobile work allowing professionals to combine their interest for the trip to the ability to work remotely. In this article, we present five forms of meta-work we have categorized according to three objectives, namely: 1) make the website and the mobile workforce work mode; 2) coordinate with others and work continuity through different places, times and projects; and 3) operate in a foreign land and traveling. For each form of meta-work we show the individual activities and interactional involved. Although the meta-work is not exclusive to this type of workers it takes a "cumulative" character for digital nomads, thereby increasing the intensity, and raises questions about the invisibility and responsibility activities associated with it. [googletranslate_en]

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) should reduce traffic accidents, but they will sometimes have to choose between two evils, such as running over pedestrians or sacrificing themselves and their passenger to save the pedestrians. Defining the algorithms that will help AVs make these moral decisions is a formidable challenge. We found that participants in six Amazon Mechanical Turk studies approved of utilitarian AVs (that is, AVs that sacrifice their passengers for the greater good) and would like others to buy them, but they would themselves prefer to ride in AVs that protect their passengers at all costs. The study participants disapprove of enforcing utilitarian regulations for AVs and would be less willing to buy such an AV. Accordingly, regulating for utilitarian algorithms may paradoxically increase casualties by postponing the adoption of a safer technology.

The Connect project, Air Liquide France Industrie is part of the future of the factory approach the Air Liquide Group. It aims to set up an operations center and remote optimization of the Group's production sites in France and introducing digital technologies in the fields of production. Innovation is not confined to technology alone. The working methods adopted participate also the innovative approach of the project. Connect is thus an illustration of the emerging concept of Change Digital. Digital technologies are developed in collaboration with end users as their experimental and agile methods. The approach is that of open innovation and collaborative to connect men and technologie.Ces technologies are not only the basic tools to develop. They are also a resource for training actions and networking. But these new ways of doing a project also raises the question of posture and place of its actors. [googletranslate_en]

In a context characterized by the desire to increase individual accountability of employees in the acquisition and maintenance of their professional skills, the use of digital technology is seen by some policymakers as a relevant solution to train employees faster and more direct link with the corporate strategy. But beyond seductive principles that show experiments in progress? To provide answers, we rely in this article on a qualitative survey of learners and trainers that followed - even, for some, who have set up - a fully digital distance education (Corporate Open Online Racing or COOC) within a large company. We point the importance of dropout rates among learners, difficulties trainers to exercise their new role as facilitator, and emphasize the discontinuities that digitization training induces on the space-time working and professional interacquaintance . We also show that these gaps have different effects on the learning abilities of employees. With the approach by Amartya Sen's capabilities, we interpret these findings in terms of conversion factors (environmental, social, individual). We argue that it is the absence of the three categories of factors that explains, for learners and trainers, discontinuities encountered and inequality in mastering new training systems. Finally, we outline ways to rethink the digitization of continuing education in order to reduce social inequalities risks crystallized around this type of techno-pedagogical devices. [googletranslate_en]

This article presents a lattice design of the production of knowledge. Its aim is to construct an ideal type of "knowledge network" in an appropriate epistemological position in the current network society. While modern posture raises a number of questions about its validity to describe the contemporary world of the organization, all is not to deny in modernity, as the place of scientific knowledge remains important and matches not to any speech. But modern representation does not consider that it is part of a knowledge network knowledge where others take their place, and which involved individuals interacting in natural and social environments. This results in the world of organizations, new ways to organize and a new mode of emergence of knowledge networks. [googletranslate_en]