Flexible Technology, Unemployment and Effort: The Role of the Organization of the Firm

Interim Reports on work of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis receive only limited review. Views or opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Institute, its National Member Organizations, or other organizations supporting the work. Acknowledgments * I am very grateful to Daniele Checchi, Giovanni Dosi and Youri Kaniovski for their suggestions and critical comments on a preliminary version of this paper. I am also indebted to Masahiko Aoki and Robert Boyer for their suggestions. Preface This new research project at IIASA is concerned with modeling technological and organisational change; the broader economic developments that are associated with technological change, both as cause and effect; the processes by which economic agents — first of all, business firms — acquire and develop the capabilities to generate, imitate and adopt technological and organisational innovations; and the aggregate dynamics — at the levels of single industries and whole economies — engendered by the interactions among agents which are heterogeneous in their innovative abilities, behavioural rules and expectations. The central purpose is to develop stronger theory and better modeling techniques. However, the basic philosophy is that such theoretical and modeling work is most fruitful when attention is paid to the known empirical details of the phenomena the work aims to address: therefore, a considerable effort is put into a better understanding of the 'stylized facts' concerning corporate organisation routines and strategy; industrial evolution and the 'demography' of firms; patterns of macroeconomic growth and trade. From a modeling perspective, over the last decade considerable progress has been made on various techniques of dynamic modeling. Some of this work has employed ordinary differential and difference equations, and some of it stochastic equations. A number of efforts have taken advantage of the growing power of simulation techniques. Others have employed more traditional mathematics. As a result of this theoretical work, the toolkit for modeling technological and economic dynamics is significantly richer than it was a decade ago. During the same period, there have been major advances in the empirical understanding. There are now many more detailed technological histories available. Much more is known about the similarities and differencers of technical advance in different fields and industries and there is some understanding of the key variables that lie behind those differences. A number of studies have provided rich information about how industry structure co-evolves with technology. In addition to empirical work at the technology …