Resumen de The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
Bloom Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen
Guided by theories of �management by exception,� 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�s place of origin and heterogeneous telecommunication costs arising from regulation) strengthens our results.
