Seminar

In a context of new digital technologies and macroeconomic uncertainty (exacerbated during the pandemic), employer incentives to invest in training and career paths, and to enhance the quality of working life, are changing with potentially adverse consequences for inequalities. This research highlights four puzzles: high skill demand lags behind high skill supply; real wages are not keeping up with higher skill supply; the skill bias of new technologies is uneven; and diverse organisational factors make the skill-productivity-job quality relationship highly contingent. The research review highlights the need for new investigations into employer demand for skills and its contingent relationship with forms of innovation, productivity and work organisation. Such research would contribute to the important policy goal of reducing society’s over-reliance on work intensification and Taylorist production as the main motors for economic growth.