Literature review and project specification Research Paper

Literature review and project specification - Research Paper Example More particularly, different studies prove the connection, practically and theoretically, between the employment influences of organizations’ ICT ventures and the effect of ICT dissemination on organizational factors linked to human resources. Berman and colleagues (2009) identify a growth in mandatory competencies during the 1980s in the sector of manufacturing, which is in part ascribed to the arrival of ICT. Bresnahan and Gambardella (2004) claim that employees and organizations have to implement the application of ICT, and provide empirical proof, at the organizational level, about the connection between the characteristics of the labor force and new recruitment practices. They show that organizations that implement innovation linked to ICT, development of new products or services, and restructuring of work, have a tendency to recruit more skilled employees. Ultimately, Landry and colleagues (2003) analyze the evolving nature of work in the period of technological innovati on (i.e. emergence of e-business) and underline major changes in organizational practices, accompanied with a marked transition towards a labor market of adaptable, skilled groups of entrepreneurial workers. It could be that developments in the use of ICT are aggravating the disparity in employability between the rich and poor technology savvies, also referred to as the ‘digital divide’ (Sims 2002). Current investigations highlight the relationships between social inequalities and ICT, their effect on recruitment practices, vocational training, professional competencies, wages, and others. As suggested by Milgrom and Roberts (1990), a business organization can be considered as a structure founded on agreements between each of its parties, comprising its workers. The interdependencies and ties that arise among those parties necessitate prompt information in order to sustain harmony. Furthermore, in competitive, demanding environments, there is an apparent need to initiat e changes in the firm toward more resilient practices, where regular job-training and specialization are means (Swart, Mann, Brown & Price 2005). In this situation, technological innovation simplifies the flow and organization of information, giving a needed assistance to the organization. The adjustment of the organizational recruitment practices is hence facilitated, allowing the formation of intricate organizations in the form of a system, in contrast to the former hierarchies founded on centralization, and reassigning an essential function to its workers through decentralization of the process of decision making (Swart et al. 2005). The arrival of innovative practices, and its relation to recruitment methods, has been broadly studied in the scholarly literature at the organizational level, leading to a number of studies of the notion referred to as ‘skill-biased technical change’ (SBTC) (Lawler, Mohrman, Mark & Neilson 2003). SBTC, more particularly, studies how the arrival of new technologies creates a prejudice towards more competent employees, and brings about a comparative boost in the demand for competent employees, because these competent employees are required in order to exploit the innovations appropriately (Lawler et al. 2003). A transformation in recruitment practices will be inclined in support of competent employees, or skill-inclined, if the new competencies are more expensive to obtain than those needed to work with old system, while