Essays on Technology, Institutions, and Workers

The present thesis investigates the complex relationships between production technologies, labour markets, and institutional arrangements. Historically, technological developments have played a crucial role in explaining socioeconomic transformations, and social scientists have developed several theoretical approaches to understand the link between production technologies and labour markets. However, many of these perspectives are grounded on technology-centred views that overemphasise the technical capabilities of machinery while discounting the crucial role of social contexts in channelling and diverting the implications of automation. This thesis stresses and supports the idea that technological change is not a relentless process driven solely by the characteristics of the technology adopted but rather that automation processes are embedded in historically defined institutional arrangements. Although this broad objective guides all the sections of this dissertation, each chapter brings a contribution of its own. The first chapter reviews the main theories on the relationship between technological change and the labour markets of the last decades, and advances a theoretical approach to the embeddedness of technological change in institutional systems. The second chapter investigates the heterogenous relation between industrial automation and occupational and class structures across different institutional arrangements. The third chapter focuses on technology, unionisation, and their relationships with the earnings of different social classes in the US from the early 1980s to our day. The fourth chapter investigates the relationship between computers, skills, and job satisfaction in Germany and the UK. Finally, the last chapter summarises the key findings and discusses the main issues and expectations concerning the most recent wave of technological development and how insights from this thesis are relevant in building expectations regarding the future of work.