1,720,969 research outputs found
Industry 4.0: revolution or hype? Reassessing recent technological trends and their impact on labour
No full textThe aim of this paper is to reassess the current view of technological trends adopting a historical perspective. In our interpretation, the historical record provides some suggestive evidence for a more sceptical view of the notion of an emerging “fourth” industrial revolution. Indeed, even at an impressionistic glance, the recent developments in AI, communication and robotics that are marked as the core of the fourth industrial revolution, appear as a rather natural prolongation of the ICT macro-trajectories described in this paper. At the same time, to study the relation between technology and labour, we focus on the plant level as the most useful unit of analysis to consider the complex interaction between management systems, labour process and technological innovations. In this sense, we examine two Internet of Things’ technologies in order to underline the persistence of a fundamental trait of the capitalist mode of production, namely the exertion of control over workers. Consistently, we expect a continuity between newly emerging management practices and previous management systems, especially referring to the ones adopted during the ICT revolution
Cinquanta anni di contrattazione di secondo livello: che cosa impariamo dal caso Lamborghini?
Full text linkNegli ultimi cinquanta anni, la natura e la qualità delle relazioni industriali in Italia è notevolmente cambiata. Il processo di contrattazione a livello nazionale è stato fortemente indebolito e il dialogo sociale tra le parti messo in discussione in diverse occasioni. La contrattazione aziendale nel gruppo automobilistico Fiat ha segnato una stagione dove la prova di forza tra direzione aziendale e sindacato sembrava giocata sul terreno dello sviluppo economico fondato su una rinuncia ai diritti dei lavoratori, e dove la dimensione globale delle relazioni industriali in un’impresa multinazionale non potesse essere messa in discussione perché questione non rilevante per la contrattazione aziendale. In tale quadro, l'esistenza di alcune realtà divergenti, come Lamborghini, risulta estremamente interessante, per il particolare contesto di sviluppo regionale in cui si colloca e per la svolta nelle sue alterne vicende quando, nel 1998, è stata acquisita nel gruppo Audi VW. Un’analisi longitudinale della contrattazione aziendale offre spunti per tracciare una periodizzazione delle tematiche al centro del confronto tra le parti, e le modalità stesse in cui avviene il confronto. Basata sulla ricostruzione del corpus originale relativo alla contrattazione, dal 1968 al 2016, l’analisi proposta in questo saggio utilizza i risultati dell’analisi automatica dei testi per una riflessione critica che affianca la lettura di documenti. Oltre a identificare un’efficace periodizzazione dei temi al centro della contrattazione aziendale, le conclusioni sottolineano il nesso tra livello nazionale e livello aziendale della contrattazione.In the last fifty years, the nature and quality of industrial relations in Italy has changed considerably. The national bargaining process has been severely weakened and social dialogue between the parties has been questioned on several occasions. Corporate bargaining in the Fiat automotive group marked a season where the test of strength between company management and the Trade Union seemed to be played out on the ground of economic development based on a waiver of workers' rights, and where the global dimension of industrial relations in a multinational company could not be questioned because it was not an issue relevant to corporate bargaining. In this context, the existence of some divergent situations, such as that of Lamborghini, is extremely interesting, due to the particular context of regional development in which it is located and to the turning point in its ups and downs when, in 1998, it was acquired by the Audi VW group. A longitudinal analysis of the bargaining at company level offers cues for tracing a periodisation of the issues at the centre of the comparison between the parties, and the methods in which the comparison takes place. Based on the original body of bargaining from 1968 to 2016, the analysis proposed in this essay uses the results of automatic text analysis for a critical reflection that flanks the reading of documents. In addition to identifying an effective periodisation of the issues at the heart of corporate bargaining, the conclusions underline the link between the national level and the corporate level of bargaining
Weaker jobs, weaker innovation. Exploring the effects of temporary employment on new products
No full textThis work explores the relationship between temporary employment and product innovation focusing on five major European economies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) observed between 1998 and 2012. The analysis distinguishes sectors according to their technological characteristics and regimes finding that industries using temporary employment tend to have a weaker product innovation propensity. The negative correlation between temporary employment and innovation turns out to be stronger in those sectors where tacit firm’s specific knowledge is crucial to the development of innovations. These sectors are identified using both the ‘Cumulativeness’ proxy stemming from Peneder’s classification as well as distinguishing between different Schumpeterian regimes–Schumpeter Mark I vs. II–of knowledge accumulation
Working from home and the explosion of enduring divides: income, employment and safety risks
No full textWhy are there so many non-teleworkable occupations? Is teleworking only a matter of ICT usage or does it also reflect the division of labour and the underlying hierarchical layers inside organizations? What does it happen to those workers not able to telework in terms of socio-economic risks, and how does the gender dimension interact with risk stratification? Hereby, we intend to shed light on these questions using a detailed integrated dataset at individual and occupational level (Indagine Campionaria delle Professioni, Indagine delle Forze di Lavoro and Inail archive) which provides information on different nature of risks (income, employment and safety). Our results entail that, first, class attributes, intended as execution of tasks, degrees of autonomy in doing the job, layers of the occupational categories, strongly influence the chance of working from home; second, those individuals who are not able to perform their work remotely are more exposed to transition to unemployment, to earn low wages, and to safety and health risks; third, being woman and employed with a temporary contract significantly amplify risk stratification
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Non-Standard Work and Innovation: Evidence from European industries
Full text linkFollowing a market-oriented approach, policies aimed at increasing labour flexibility by weakening employment protection institutions should enable firms to efficiently allocate resources, improve their capability to compete on international markets and adjust to economic cycle. This work documents the rise of non-standard (i.e. temporary and part-time) work in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) over the period 1994–2016 and investigates the nexus between the use of non-standard work and innovation performance using data for 18 manufacturing and 23 service industries. Contrary to the objectives that market-oriented policy recommendations promised to achieve, we show that there is a significantly negative association between the share of workers employed under non-standard contractual arrangements and the introduction of both product and process innovation. Furthermore, we show that the harmful consequences of the spread of non-standard work on firms’ product innovation propensity are more pronounced in high-tech sectors
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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