Workers Education and Reorganization of Work: Why do Firms choose Taylorian or Ohnian Organizations?

Preliminary Version This paper studies how firms choose their organization of work. It demonstrates the existence of different strategies of work organization which depend on the workers’s ability to acquire new competence by performing a particular task and on their ability to benefit from these competence in executing another task. We show i) that Ohnian and Taylorian working-time organizations may coexist in the economy, ii) that organi-zational strategies depend on both the workers ’ level of education and the production technology, and iii) that the effect of technological shocks on the organizational choices of firms depends on the techniques of production, on the magnitude of the shocks and on the organization of work before the shocks, iv) changes in the efficiency or in the priorities of the educational system may affect the organizational choices of firms