di Marta Angelici, Paola Profeta – Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca

Does removing the constraints of time and place of work increase the utility of workers and firms? We design a randomized experiment on a sample of workers in a large Italian company: workers are randomly divided into a treated group that engages in flexible space and time job (which we call “smart-working”) one day per week for 9 months and a control group that continues to work traditionally. By comparing the treated and control workers, we find causal evidence that the flexibility of smart-working increases the productivity of workers and improves their well-being and work-life balance. We also observe that the effects are stronger for women and that there are no significant spillover effects within workers of a team.

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di Bin Chen (Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), Tao Liu (School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University; Institute of East Asian Studies, University Duisburg-Essen; Institute for Sociology, University Duisburg-Essen) e Yngqui Wang (Center for Social Security Studies, Wuhan University)

This research is based on empirical surveys conducted in two Chinese cities, Beijing and Chengdu, which examine employment relationships, labor protection and social protection in the new digital economy. Through these theoretically informed surveys on various forms of employment via online platforms, we have found that the organizational principles and functional patterns of employment have profoundly transformed in the epoch of digitalization. The traditional employment relationship characterized by written contracts with clearly defined entitlements and obligations for employers and employees have been increasingly substituted by new volatile, fluid and fragile employment forms, softening the labor rights and social rights of “digital employees” and strengthening social control over them through online evaluation systems supported by smart phones and apps. The employees engaged in the online sharing economy have become more individualized and atomized than ever before, resulting in the emergence of an unorganized and disenfranchised “digital working class”.

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di Massimo Neri

Smart working is one of the keywords universally used to define the changes resulting from the application of ICT in work organization. Recently introduced in the Italian Labour Law, Smart working (or Agile work) implicates practices across at least 3 dimensions: time (when do people work?), location (where do people work?), role and source (how do people work?). In this publication, which collects the discussion of the TAO Research Programs seminar that took place at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in September 2016, scholars from different disciplines reflect critically about two crucial questions: what changes are we observing and which theoretical categories can we use to understand them?

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di Alan Felstead, Golo Henseke

This article critically assesses the assumption that more and more work is being detached from place and that this is a ‘win-win’ for both employers and employees. Based on an analysis of official labour market data, it finds that only one-third of the increase in remote working can be explained by compositional factors such as movement to the knowledge economy, the growth in flexible employment and organisational responses to the changing demographic make-up of the employed labour force. This suggests that the detachment of work from place is a growing trend. This article also shows that while remote working is associated with higher organisational commitment, job satisfaction and job-related well-being, these benefits come at the cost of work intensification and a greater inability to switch off.

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