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This work examines the intersection between traditional human resource management and the novel employment arrangements of the expanding gig economy. While there is a substantial multidisciplinary literature on the digital platform labor phenomenon, it has been largely centered on the experiences of gig workers. As digital labor platforms continue to grow and specialize, more managers, executives, and human resource practitioners will need to make decisions about whether and how to utilize gig workers. Here the authors explore and interrogate the unique features of human resource management (HRM) activities in the context of digital labor platforms. The authors discuss challenges and opportunities regarding (1) HRM in organizations that outsource labor needs to external labor platforms, (2) HRM functions within digital labor platform firms, and (3) HRM policies and practices for organizations that develop their own spin-off digital labor platform. To foster a more nuanced understanding of work in the gig economy, the authors identify common themes across these contexts, highlight knowledge gaps, offer recommendations for future research, and outline pathways for collecting empirical data on HRM in the gig economy.

This chapter studies the negative signals associated with nonpromotion. I first show theoretically that, when workers' productivity rises little with additional years on the same job level, the negative signal associated with nonpromotion leads to wage decreases. On the other hand, when additional job-level tenure leads to a sizable increase in productivity, workers' wages increase. I then test my model's predictions using the personnel records from a large US firm from 1970–1988. I find a clear hump-shaped wage-job-tenure profile for workers who stay at the same job level, which supports my model's prediction.

A model of reputation is developed to show how firms operating in concentrated sectors can use the sponsorship of general human capital investments to specifically trained workers as a device of commitment with prospective employees. Employees of firms that operate in concentrated sectors learn skills that are valuable only for a limited number of alternative employers. This gives monopsonistic power to the training firm over the trained workers. Anticipating it, potential employees will be reluctant to work for the firm unless the employer is able to commit oneself’ must be turned back to ‘herself. I argue that human resource policies including the provision of general human capital to workers reduce employers’ commitment costs. Evidence from two representative samples of workers from Spain and the United Kingdom show that, consistent with the predictions of the model, firms from more concentrated sectors are more likely to sponsor their employees’ education.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer new justification for multiskilling practices such as job rotation and extensive training for broad skills and explain why there appear to exist complementarity between multiskilling and the delegation of decision authority to workers.

By developing a new model of incomplete contracting where workers make noncontractable investments in multiple skills, we obtain the key insight that worker investments in firm-specific human capital become strategic substitutes when their skills overlap each other.

The “skill substitution effect” analyzed in this chapter induces the following three major results, unless specialization offers a substantial technological advantage: (1) workers' incentives to invest in firm-specific human capital tend to be stronger; (2) the optimal level of delegation is typically higher; and (3) firms' ex post profits tend to be higher with multiskilling than with specialization.

The novel implication of the chapter is that multiskilling may be desirable from a firm's viewpoint even if there are no technological or informational task complementarities among the combined skills, which have been believed to be primary reasons for multiskilling in prior works.

This chapter explores the meanings that human service workers employed in the airline industry and in higher education give to workplace fear, the ways it is expressed, and perceptions of its consequences. The findings reveal that fear is not a wholly “negative” emotion, as it can contribute to the achievement of desirable outcomes when openly expressed, suggesting that simplistic evaluations of discrete emotions (i.e. positive or negative) and prescriptive organizational norms of emotional expression may block positive as well as negative outcomes (organizationally and personally). This chapter concludes that permitting a greater range of emotional displays at work could significantly improve workers’ wellbeing and the effectiveness of their organizations.

The introduction of rapidly changing technologies into the workplace has made it more important for organization leaders to understand how to manage technology, middle-skill, and low-skill employees in the workplace. The knowledge of employees within these levels in the workplace is the least known. There are varying levels of influence in workplaces, and the dynamic between people and technology has implications for human resource professionals throughout the world as they grapple with change from technological advancement and human improvement.

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988–2006 Displaced Worker Supplement (DWS) of the Current Population Survey (CPS), namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs than for plant closings. Because high-productivity workers are more likely to be recalled than low-productivity ones, they may choose to signal their productivity though unemployment, in which case the duration of unemployment may be positively related to post-displacement wages. Identification is done using workers whose plant closed as they cannot be recalled, and no incentives to signal arise.

This essay asks: How can we understand and theorise the impacts of robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on everyday life based on Radical Humanism? How can Lefebvre's ideas be used to reveal the ideological character of contemporary accounts of the impacts of robots and AI on society? It engages with rather unknown works of the Radical Humanist Henri Lefebvre on the sociology and philosophy of technology such as Vers le cybernanthrope (Towards the Cybernanthrope). Foundations of a Lefebvrian, dialectical, Radical Humanist approach to the sociology and philosophy of technology are presented. This essay introduces Lefebvre's notion of the cybernanthrope and sets it in relation to robots and AI in contemporary society. Based on Lefebvre's critique of the cybernanthrope, this chapter develops foundations of the ideology critique of robots and AI in digital capitalism. It discusses examples of technological deterministic and social constructivist thought in the context of robotics, AI, and cyborgs and argues for an alternative, Lefebvrian, dialectical approach. This essay situates Humanism in the context of computing, AI and robotics. The chapter advances a Lefebvrian Radical Humanism by engaging in analyses of AI and robots in Post-humanism, Transhumanism, techno-deterministic approaches, social construction of technology approaches, techno-optimism, techno-pessimism, acceleratonism, the mass unemployment hypothesis and Spike Jonze's movie Her. This chapter shows that the major lesson we can learn from the Radical Humanist sociology of technology and Henri Lefebvre's works on technology is that Radical Humanism helps creating and sustaining technologies for the many, not the few. This insight remains of high relevance in the age of digital capitalism, smart robots and AI.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the proliferation of scientific management and then to consider its effect on business and society. Our examination begins with a brief survey of various management approaches that emerged in the early twentieth century. We focus on Frederick Taylor, the originator of scientific management, as the person with the greatest influence on management scholarship. We assert that the propagation of scientific management in all sectors of business and society is so pervasive that is it ubiquitous, making it exceedingly difficult to consciously detect or question. We examine how core ideas from scientific management have facilitated the dehumanization of stakeholders in management scholarship and practice. We then discuss how dehumanizing tendencies — informed by the hidden ubiquity of scientific management — have permeated research in corporate social responsibility and management theory. We conclude with suggestions for integrating humanity into management theory.