Is ICT transforming the world of work? And how to know about it?

There is a very clear consensus on the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the shaping of contemporary organisational characteristics as well as in the characteristics of the functions that today's workforce should perform. However, in order to develop adequate policy measures for leading the European economies into the information age in an effective and desirable way, there is a need for truly understanding the impact of ICT on organisations and on job characteristics. Indeed, although there is little debate on the fact that ICT has an important impact, there is far less of a consensus on the causal mechanisms and variables through which this impact actually works out in practice. Therefore, the Stile-project has made an inventory of recent organisation surveys and has conducted a benchmark of these surveys with regard to methodological and conceptual aspects. The results of this exercice make clear that relatively few surveys take on the challenge of augmenting our knowledge and understanding of the impact of ICT on the (internal and external) labour market. The report makes operational recommendations for overcoming this conceptual and empirical gap. This includes recommendations on the methodological aspects of designing organisational surveys, as well as a modular questionnaire that provides operational questions for these surveys.nrpages: 94status: publishe