Is Innovation Obsession Good News for Employees? How New Technology Adoption and Work Organization Practices Transform Job Quality and Working Conditions

Our paper contributes to better understanding the relations between innovation diffusion by adoption and the evolution of work practices and institutions. Most studies on employment and innovation focus on the impacts of innovation on employment variation and turnover. These studies tend to analyze the differentiated effects of technological change on the labor structure with the well-known skilled-biased technological change (SBTC) and routine-biased technological change (RBTC) hypotheses. However, few empirical studies focus explicitly on the transformative role of new technology adoption in the qualitative dimension of jobs. A new technology adoption in the workplace does not induce a total replacement of the workforce. In that respect, understanding the effect of a new technology adoption on job quality and working conditions, among other job characteristics, is a key element in capturing the reality of technological change with regard to employment. By combining the literature on innovation, workplace practices (especially human resource management (HRM) practices), and job quality, we build an empirical model that highlights various interdependencies. The literature provides us with fragmented hypotheses about these interactions, but the main limit is the very different approaches, which lead to ambiguous effects. Starting from the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) (2010), we try to identify the effect of innovation combined with work organization practices on job quality. We observe that new technology adoption is generally associated with better employment quality in some ways but, simultaneously, leads to higher workplace risk and work-time intensity. Furthermore, our study highlights the need to associate innovation with different forms of work practices. Analyzing new technology adoption coupled with new information and communication technology (ICT) use or some work organization practices, we observe dissociated effects, and the same occurs when we separately analyze the new technology adoption effect by type of employee. Our paper is a first step not only in answering the calls for more in-depth research on the links between employment variation and work transformations due to technological change but also in studying that which more clearly distinguishes the effect according to the type of innovation. Finally, our study shows the weakness of the available and adopted database for testing and evaluating these interrelations.