How Are Skills Changing with Digital Technologies? Clarifying Boundary Conditions in Management Research

This article contributes to discussions about the future of work by providing a systematic review of the broad yet fragmented management literature on how skills are changing with digital technologies (DTs). Our aim was to understand the nature of scholarly engagement with this relationship to inform a future research agenda. Our systematic review identified 225 original empirical articles that explicitly examined skills and DTs. We highlight the diverse categories of context, mechanisms, and outcomes in the form of an analytical matrix, guided by an organizational conceptualization of skill that spans positivist and social constructivist approaches. Our analysis generates four theoretical framings of how skills are changing with DTs: market shift, control shift, recombination, and imbrication. These framings are derived from two analytical dimensions of skill change: transactional versus transformational and objective versus relational. We interrogate the fit between each theoretical framing and the affordances of DTs, bringing to light how skill change with DTs is entangled with shifting temporal dimensions and a rich variety of interactions and interdependencies. Our theoretical framings, analytical dimensions, and insights into the relationship between skill change and DTs provide the basis for a more coherent management research agenda.