Software, firm performance and work organisation : an empirical analysis

摘要

This thesis analyses the use and impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on firms and employees. The types of ICT which are used for the analyses in this thesis are enterprise software systems such as standardised enterprise software designed to fi t one certain business sector and enterprise software customised for a single firm as well as social software applications like wikis, blogs and social networks. The link between enterprise software and social software applications forms a further software type used in the thesis called social enterprise software (SES). In the second chapter of this thesis, I analyse the relationship between enterprise software systems and service innovations. The third chapter sheds light on the performance impacts and benefits of the adoption of SES as an ICT innovation. The thesis also deals with the question of whether the use of social software in a firm has an impact on labour productivity in Chapter 4. The fifth chapter of this thesis moves away from the firm level to the individual level and focuses on work organisation. I investigate the determinants of working at home as a form of flexible work arrangements which is nowadays enabled to a large amount by ICT. The thesis relies on three di fferent data sets. Two of the data sets used in this thesis are surveys among German fi rms collected by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). They are used in the fi rm-level analysis in Chapters 2 to 4. The first data set stems from a letter based survey among the "service providers of the information society" while the second data set is called the "ICT survey" and is based on telephone interviews. The third data set is the BIBB/BAuA employee survey that contains individual-level data collected by telephone interviews. The thesis provides diff erent analytical frameworks: the production and knowledge production function framework as well as the adoption of new technologies and persistence in innovations on the firm level. The discrete choice model is used for the individual-level analysis of flexible work arrangements. The results of the firm-level analysis in Chapter 2 reveal that using customised enterprise software increases the probability of fi rms in the service sector to realise service innovations while sector-speci c enterprise software has no infl uence on service innovation. Concerning social enterprise software, the results in Chapter 3 show that fi rms which use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce applications are more likely to adopt SES. The correlations also reveal weak evidence for complementarity between B2B e-commerce and SES. In addition, sales and labour productivity are highest for fi rms using SES and B2B e-commerce applications in conjunction. The results in Chapter 4 suggest that the impact of social software on labour productivity is negative. In the case of flexible work arrangements in Chapter 5, the results indicate that men have a higher probability to work at home but women are more likely to work at home intensively. Education, tenure and the use of computers increase the probability of working at home while fi rm size and a young age of employees under 30 years reduce it. Having children less than six years old, overtime and work time have positive impacts on both working at home and on working at home intensively.