The reasons why inventions that shaped industrial revolutions, occurred in the UK and in the USA, have been suggested by economic historians. For the first time,we access the determinants of more than a hundred inventions around the world, explaining why they occurred in a given country and why...

The determinants of human capital have been studied sparsely in the literature. Although there is a huge literature on the determinants of schooling linked with the quality of schooling, there are not many contributions that explore the deep determinants of investment in, quantity and quality of...

A fruitful recent theoretical literature has related human capital and technological development with income (and wages) inequality. However, empirical assessments on the relationship are still scarce. We relate human capital and total factor productivity (TFP) with inequality and discover that,...

The main objective of this paper is to discuss how far the cultural environment is related to the potential that new forms of work organization, namely autonomy and teamwork, have for success. To accomplish this objective two main approaches will be used: on the one hand, the Socio-Technical...

High-performance work systems (HPWS) can be seen as a set of new forms of work organization combined with flexible human resources (HR) practices that enhance organizational performance through employee involvement and empowerment. Although in the past two decades much research has been...

The present economic context is heavily marked by a global crisis without precedents. Facing this constraint, companies feel pressured to undertake even greater efforts in order to optimize available resources. Work organisation is one of the mechanisms that managers use to align human resources...

In Europe, anthropocentric organization models – an updated version of the sociotechnique approach – had their maximum expression in the Swedish model, which came to be known as “uddevalism” or “volvoism”. Several factors were presented as conditioners of this success [1], and some...

In Europe, anthropocentric organization models had their maximum expression in the Swedish model, which came to be known as “uddevalism” or “volvoism”. There are several factors that were presented as conditioners of this success (cf. Durand, 1994). Some critical factors to the success...