Spécialisation et polyvalence des travailleurs. Une représentation microéconomique

This paper studies how firms choose their organization of work, i.e. how they assign heterogenous workers to different production tasks. It demonstrates the existence of different strategies of work organization which depend on the workers? ability to acquire new competence by performing a particular task and on their ability to benefit from their newly acquired competence in executing another task. We demonstrate (i) that the optimal organization of work depends on the production technology, the productive characteristics of workers and on the labor force composition, and that (ii) Ohnoian and Taylorian working-time organizations may coexist. Classification JEL : D2, J22, J24