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This paper examines the effects of robots across various occupations in US manufacturing plants, extending extant research conducted at the firm and industry levels. We use a difference-in-differences approach matched on industry, commuting zone, and plant size to estimate how employment and skill demand for various occupations change after robot adoption. We find that the introduction of robots is associated with 150 percent increase in the number of job postings and an increase in employment of 15 percent; the increase is larger in production jobs than in support jobs. Comparing effects across plants within adopting firms, we show that the expansion only occurs in the robotic plants, suggesting that prior firm-level studies overlooked the distinction between adopter and (majority) nonadopter plants within firms, underestimating the robotization effect. We find a negligible employment effect at the industry level as the positive effect in adopters is counterbalanced by the lost of workers in nonadopters. The majority of jobs do not change skill composition following the adoption, but the robotized part of the plant requires more design, production, maintenance, repair, and programming skills. We provide credible evidence that the productivity and robot-human complementarity effects dominate any displacement effect and that loss of employment is limited to outcompeted nonadopters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do employees fare better in firms they partly own? By examining workers' reviews of their employers on the website Glassdoor, we offer the first expansive comparison of employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing on production workers and managers in an industry-labor market matched sample within U.S. manufacturing, we find that employees report greater satisfaction in employee-owned firms overall and within specific aspects of jobs such as their firms' culture. Such differences in job quality cannot be rationalized by differences in skill demand and are greater when the ESOP is the product of collective bargaining. This work highlights how match quality can differ by ownership arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of production technologies, directly and indirectly through complexity and task interdependence, on outcomes important to the organization of work. Our study uses online job vacancy postings in the manufacturing sector during 2017-2021 to analyze technical occupations (i.e., engineers, technicians, and operators) in plants that implement one of six primary technologies: subtraction, forming, molding, additive manufacturing, chemical, and assembly. Controlling for different forms of automation, location, and other factors, we find that the differences in division of labor, specialization, and span of control among technologies are driven by differences in complexity. Additive manufacturing, chemical, and assembly are technologically more complex than forming, molding, and subtraction, and, as a result, they need more jobs to be designed, more tasks and skills to be bundled in a job, and fewer employees to be overseen by a manager. Moreover, each technology exhibits a distinct pattern of two forms of task interdependence--reciprocal and sequential, and therefore the effects on the three outcomes are more nuanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although network embeddedness has been associated with organizational aspirations, little is known on how the behavior of firms in their dynamic centrality network positions affects their aspirations to initiate interorganizational strategic alliances. Whereas, extant research has focused on traditional network indicators, the effect of the variability of the firm's position throughout network evolution on firm's aspiration performance remains underexplored. To address this issue, we argue and observe how dynamic brokerage and proximity affect the tendency of firms to form interorganizational strategic alliances in response to organizational aspirations. Based on a sample of strategic alliances from the global pharmaceutical industry for the period 1991-2012, we find evidence for our proposed hypotheses, and contribute to the literature by providing a dynamic lens of alliance networks that shapes organizational behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]