SummaryUpdated: 04/07/2005

Towards convergence? Current state and future ways of establishment based ICT- and labour market monitoring in Europe

Lutz Bellmann & Markus Promberger (eds.)
with Peter Ester, Seth Maenen, Monique Ramioul, Amélia Román & Geert Van Hootegem

There is a very clear consensus on the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the shaping of contemporary organisational characteristics as well as in the characteristics of the functions that today's workforce should perform. However, in order to develop adequate policy measures for leading the European economies into the information age there is a need for a truly understanding of the impact of ICT on organisations and on job characteristics. In order to make internationally comparable impact research possible, the STILE consortium made an inventory of existing measures and stakeholders needs. On the basis of this analysis it formulated recommendations concerning running internationally comparable establishment surveys.

This report discusses opportunities and limitations of existing establishment surveys and it identifies gaps in existing research. It proposes a module that can fill these gaps. Analysing stakeholders’ interests and needs the consortium has identified opportunities and limitations for running cross-national comparisons. On the unions’ side it is mainly a certain mistrust against management questioning, on the employers’ side it is the wishes not to expose internal procedures of establishments to scientific analysis or public opinion. But the structures of knowledge transfer between academic institutions and stakeholder organisations offer opportunities to improve that situation by raising interest and support to establishment-based labour market research. This report offers two ways to reach more convergence, one of them in the top down direction, facing several obstacles hard to overcome, and the bottom up direction, of which the STILE approach is an example.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 863
Price: 6.5 euro

Understanding occupations in the Information Age

An Bollen, Rik Huys & Monique Ramioul
with Francesca della Ratta, Peter Ester, Csaba Makó, Cristina Oteri, Joanne Pratt, Amélia Román, Péter Tamási, Eva Tót & Hans van Poppel

Striving for economic growth and employment opportunities, policy makers put forward a better match between supply and demand on the labour market as a key objective. For this they are in need of in-depth and updated insight into tasks and competence requirements. Occupational profiles make a clear overview of tasks and related competence requirements of a certain occupation. These overviews are used by employment offices, training institutes, educational institutes etc. as a basis for developing programmes that are focused at ‘tackling the skills gap’.

The STILE project has taken this challenge as the starting point for developing a profile of two occupations that are typical for the ‘New Economy’. In the contemporary economic environment boundaries between economic sectors are blurring and technological developments change with great strides. Providing clear and well-defined occupational profiles is not obvious in the current social and economic circumstances. Working on profiles of ICT occupations in an international comparative perspective has led to three important results. First of all the project resulted in a profile of customer technical support and web development & -maintenance. Second, the work made enabled identifying opportunities and limitations of existing profiling methods for getting insight into occupations that emerged in the ‘New Economy’. This resulted in recommendations for profiling occupations. Third, the project has evolved interesting questions for other international comparative research on the occupations that were studied. This report deals with these three outcomes.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 914
Price: 7.5 euro

Opening the black box
Classification and coding of sectors and occupations in the eEconomy

Ursula Huws & Peter van der Hallen (eds.)
with Imogen Bertin, Tamás Koltai, Markus Promberger, Nicola Tickner & Roel Verlinden

The development of an eEconomy poses major challenges to the conceptual basis of traditional schemes for classifying industries and occupations, by blurring the boundaries between the old categories as well as giving birth to new ones. In particular, an increasingly differentiated group of activities involved in the supply of business services can be seen as representing a new phase in the division of labour, which has implications not only for the classification of economic activities within national economies but also for their global distribution. This report presents the results of an experiment carried out within the frame of the STILE project in which coders in five EU Member States were asked to code 150 fictionalised descriptions of ‘new’ occupations and 150 descriptions of ‘new’ establishments in order to test the extent to which the international classification systems, ISCO (for occupations) and NACE (for sectors) currently capture the new realities of the eEconomy.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 905
Price: 15.5 euro

Is ICT transforming the world of work? And how to know about it?

Rik Huys, Geert Van Hootegem, Seth Maenen & Monique Ramioul (eds.)
with Markus Promberger

There is a very clear consensus on the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the shaping of contemporary organisational characteristics as well as in the characteristics of the functions that today's workforce should perform. However, in order to develop adequate policy measures for leading the European economies into the information age in an effective and desirable way, there is a need for truly understanding the impact of ICT on organisations and on job characteristics. Indeed, although there is little debate on the fact that ICT has an important impact, there is far less of a consensus on the causal mechanisms and variables through which this impact actually works out in practice. Therefore, the STILE project has made an inventory of recent establishment surveys and has conducted a benchmark of these surveys with regard to methodological and conceptual aspects. The results of this exercise make clear that relatively few surveys contribute to knowledge and a better understanding of the impact of ICT on the (internal and external) labour market. The report makes operational recommendations for overcoming this conceptual and empirical gap. This includes recommendations on the methodological aspects of designing organisational surveys, as well as a modular questionnaire that provides operational questions for these surveys.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 915
Price: 9 euro

The missing E. The use of national elements of the LFS for eWork analysis
Nick Jagger (ed.)
with Imogen Bertin, Peter Ester, Ursula Huws, Cristina Oteri, Sarah Perryman, Monique Ramioul, Amélia Román, Alex Stimpson, Roel Verlinden & Christophe Zerr

This report draws on series of national reports aiming to examine the ways that the Community Labour Force Survey (CLFS) can be used for measuring eWork. It focuses on eWork in its broadest sense, being ‘any type of work which involves the digital processing of information and which uses a telecommunications link for receipt or delivery of the work to a remote employer or business client.’ The work discusses opportunities and limitations of questions that have been used in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) of Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the UK. In addition, information from English translations of the LFS questionnaires in remaining EU countries have been included.

At the end this report draws lessons of the national variants to generate recommendations for improving the analysis of eWork, using the CLFS.

This publication is the final report of workpackage 2 ‘Extending the coding used in current national LFS’ of the STILE project. The project is funded under the ‘Information Society Technologies Programme’ of the European Commission. HIVA is the co-ordinator of this project. The other research partners are from: Ireland, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary and the United States.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 879
Price: 12 euro

Working at a distance. How to know about it?

Cristina Oteri & Francesca della Ratta (eds.)
with Giovanna Altieri, Peter Bates, Imogen Bertin, An Bollen, Ursula Huws, Judit Lakatos, Csaba Makó, Joanne Pratt, Monique Ramioul, Péter Tamási & Nicola Tickner

Thanks to new information and communication technologies, people can work where they want and whenever they want. Telework is becoming widespread and it is emerging in various forms. These new work forms impact on the labour market; they enlarge opportunities for participation of certain groups on the labour market, the quality of the jobs changes, etc. Therefore, policy makers concerned about the labour market, are in need of figures on telework.

STILE started from the insight that existing telework related research is confronted with some major problems. First of all, there are as much telework definitions as there are researches, causing problems of comparability. Second, most telework related research is limited to tele-homeworkers, representing only a minority of all teleworkers. Third, most telework research does not try to gain insight into the spread of telework. There is a clear need for impact research.
In answer to these challenges, the STILE consortium has developed a telework module that can be flexibly attached to existing employee surveys. In contrast with existing telework questions, the module does not start from a clear definition of telework. The questions in the module allow to derive a definition that fits best with the research questions of a specific research. It has been tested in Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, U.K. and U.S.A. This test has proved the efficiency, the flexibility and the usefulness of the module. This report gives an overview of the module and it presents the most important recommendations for attaching it to an existing employee survey.

This publication is the final report of workpackage 5 ‘Ad hoc module on telework’ of the STILE project. The project is funded under the ‘Information Society Technologies Programme’ of the European Commission. HIVA is the co-ordinator of this project. The other research partners are from: Ireland, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary and the United States.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 864
Price: 13 euro

Mobility in the eEconomy

Alex Stimpson & Maarten Tielens

This publication is the final Deliverable of Work Package 6 ‘Mobility in the eEconomy’ of the STILE project. The project is funded under the ‘Information Society Technologies Programme’ of the European Commission. HIVA is the co-ordinator of this project. The other research partners are from Ireland, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary and the United States.

This report has sought to reveal determinants of the mobility of ICT workers, to detail the inflow and outflow of ICT workers’ mobility and to look at the effect gender, age and educational background have on the ICT jobs being created. It also determines flows within the ICT sector and between ICT and other branches by regrouping the economic destination sectors of ICT personnel into broad categories. Two principal sources have been used to do so: the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Belgian Datawarehouse Labour Market of administrative data.

A quantitative assessment, however, needs to be accompanied by a more qualitative and methodological evaluation, an exercise that was illuminated by a detailed examination of the data from the two sources as it led to a number of additional insights and questions. As such this report provides a methodological SWOT-analysis of both the (EU) LFS and the Belgian Datawarehouse and compares the data of both sources in order to make recommendations on a better measurement of mobility in the (EU) LFS.

Leuven: HIVA-K.U.Leuven
2004
Publication n° 906
Price: 15 euro


Measuring the Information Society

Ramioul M., Huws U. & Bollen A. (eds.)

The development of a global Knowledge-based Society has presented huge new challenges to statisticians as occupations, businesses, production and work processes and labour market be­haviour are transformed at accelerating speed. In the absence of reliable data, the public debate is all too often based on anecdote, hype or misinformation. The speed and scope of the current labour market changes instigate new demands for information, coming from policy-makers, jour­nalists, academics and other stakeholders. Some of these demands include: How many companies practice offshore outsourcing and how many jobs are at risk? How many teleworkers are there? How many people work in call centres? How many people use computers at work? How many work in virtual teams? How fast are these trends growing? Which countries are leading these develop­ments and which are lagging behind? Is work really becoming more flexible? And are workers really becoming more mobile?

Drawing on the work of the European STILE project (www.STILE.be), this unique book brings together contributions from leading European academic and independent research institutes and National Statistical Institutes, academic experts and international organisations. The result is a comprehensive overview - indispensable reading for statisticians, researchers or policy-makers with an interest in gaining an accurate insight into the economic and social upheavals accompanying technological change and informing a responsible public debate on the future of work.

Contents

	Measuring the labour market in the New Economy: the work of the STILE project / Monique Ramioul & An Bollen
	European establishment surveys: obstacles and opportunities on the road to cross-national convergence / Peter Ester, Markus Promberger & Amelia Román
	Employers’ demand for part-time workers: incidence and motives in Germany and the Netherlands / Piet Allaart & Lutz Bellmann
	Reflections on mobility in the New Economy / Anders Ekeland
	A cost benefit assessment of administrative databases and surveys in measuring labour market mobility / Mikael Åkerblom
	Measuring labour market mobility in the ICT sector / Alex Stimpson & Maarten Tielens
	Measuring potential offshoring of ICT intensive using occupations / Desirée van Welsum & Graham Vickery
	Coding and classification of sectors and occupations in the eEconomy / Ursula Huws
	Occupational profiling in the Information Society / Ben Hövels
	New occupations in a new economic environment: European similarities and differences / An Bollen & Monique Ramioul
	How to measure eWork in social surveys / Giovanna Altieri, Francesca della Ratta & Cristina Oteri
	Telework: the latest figures and what they mean / Joanne Pratt
	Interplay of technological and organisational innovations: the case of eWork diffusion in the New Member States / Csaba Makó & Miklós Illéssy

Leuven: HIVA
2005 250p. ISBN: 90-5550-403-3
HIVA publication n° 959
19.5 € (exclusive shipping)

This publication can be ordered by email (HIVA@kuleuven.be), by fax (+32 16 323344) or via our ordering facilities on our website www.hiva.be .