Sherry Tanious ’21 Coauthors Paper on Technological Change and the Workplace

The British Journal of Industrial Relations has published a paper titled “Information Technology, Business Strategy and the Reassignment of Work from In-House Employees to Agency Temps,” coauthored by Sherry Tanious ’21 and Adam Seth Litwin. Litwin is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, where Tanious obtained her bachelor’s degree. 

Read the paper and watch the accompanying video.

The paper, an empirical study which relies on data from more than 2,500 British workplaces collected in the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study, evaluates how technological change reshapes the employment relationship. New technology, Tanious and Litwin suggest, allows, but does not force, “employers to alter the very foundation of the employment relationship itself.”

According to the paper, for those employers electing to compete on price, rather than quality, the adoption of information technologies facilitates managers’ reassignment of work once done by in-house employees to those working for third-party staffing agencies. This phenomenon — the externalization of work — has implications for workers’ job satisfaction, bargaining power, and legal rights, Tanious and Litwin argue.

At the same time, the paper finds that employers electing to compete on quality over price tend to use information technology to avoid work reassignment. The paper thus provides a nuanced understanding of how information technology changes the nature of work. Whereas some employers may use information technology to cut labor costs by replacing regular employees with temporary workers, others use information technology to retain their current workforces.