The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization

作者：Bloom Nicholas^*; Garicano Luis; Sadun Raffaella; Van Reenen John

来源：Management Science, 2014, 60(12): 2859-2885.

DOI：10.1287/mnsc.2014.2013

• organization
• delegation
• information technology
• communication technology
• the theory of the firm

Guided by theories of %26quot;management by exception,%26quot; we study the impact of information and communication technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and span of control. The theory suggests that information technology is a decentralizing force, whereas communication technology is a centralizing force. Using a new data set of American and European manufacturing firms, we find indeed that better information technologies (enterprise resource planning (ERP) for plant managers and computer-assisted design/computer-assisted manufacturing for production workers) are associated with more autonomy and a wider span of control, whereas technologies that improve communication (like data intranets) decrease autonomy for workers and plant managers. Using instrumental variables (distance from ERP%26apos;s place of origin and heterogeneous telecommunication costs arising from regulation) strengthens our results. %26lt;br%26gt;Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2013.

• 出版日期2014-11