ICC Advance Access originally published online on January 3, 2008
Industrial and Corporate Change 2008 17(1):29-64; doi:10.1093/icc/dtm038
ICT, skills, and organizational change: evidence from Italian manufacturing firms
Correspondence: Paola Giuri, Laboratory of Economics and Management, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, piazza Martiri della Libertà, 33, 56127 Pisa, Italy. e-mail: giuri{at}sssup.it
Correspondence: Salvatore Torrisi, Department of Management, University of Bologna, via Capo di Lucca 34, 20126 Bologna, Italy. e-mail: torrisi{at}unibo.it
Correspondence: Natalia Zinovyeva, Laboratory of Economics and Management, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies; BETA, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. e-mail: zinovyeva{at}cournot.u-strasbg.fr
This article examines the complementarity among information and communication technologies (ICT), skills, and organizational change from a panel of 680 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995–2003. By drawing on different statistical methods, we found evidence of complementarity between skills and organizational change, but did not find evidence of complementarity between ICT and skills. Moreover, our results show that the hypothesis of full complementarity among ICT, human capital, and organizational change does not apply to small and medium firms. Instead, we discovered that organizational change yields negative effects on the complementarity between ICT and human capital.