Technology adoption and the organization of production. The case of digital production technologies

This thesis investigates the determinants for technology adoption and diffusion, with specific reference to the new generation of digital production technologies. A privileged focus is placed on the automotive sector, given its peculiarities as a fertile field for both technology and organizational changes.As such, this thesis draws from, and aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the hypothesized rapid adoption of highly transformative technologies. Whilst technological innovations have undoubtedly evolved at exponential rates in the past decades, we here argue that the actual adoption of these technologies depends on a number of elements that pre-exist in the productive structure that intends to adopt them. In this study, we address the following questions: what types of technologies are being adopted in the realm of the alleged Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), why are they adopted and, eventually, how are they used. Business models and institutional features are an essential element to address the direction of technological change and to understand how such changes happen. This thesis comprises three main contributions. First, we attempt to reframe the theoretical debates related to technological change – to then focus on a narrower aspect of it, that is the adoption of process innovations – and consider the firm as the main unit of analysis to understand how technological change happens. In this framework, our main contribution is the bridge between industrial economics that delves deeper into opportunities and constrains determined at the production process level (material properties, similarities, complementarities), and the Global Value Chains framework, something that contributes to shed further light on the hierarchical dynamics that determine the adoption of specific types of technologies. We developed this synthesis in Essay I and we then empirically discuss its implications in Essay II and Essay III. Second, a methodological contribution to the field of technological change is our mixed methods research design. We adopted quantitative methods (econometric techniques) to study the diffusion of a specific type of technologies (i.e., industrial robots) using recent and detailed datasets that were able to give a full picture of industrial robots’ diffusion, and one of its potential determinants, i.e., Foreign Direct Investment. Then, in the attempt to gather a full picture also of technology adoption, we studied the determinants of it through a pool of more than 35 semi-structured interviews gathered in South Africa with a field work of over four months. Third, we enrich the empirical literature of our topic by introducing a new framework for the analysis of technology adoption’s drivers, which we present at the end of Essay III. Our findings identify three main drivers which, despite looking at the specificities of the production technologies involved, are strongly embedded into, and dependent on, the productive eco-system discussed in Essay II; these drivers are: volume demanded, quality of the product and worker’s safety. Although international constraints and power dynamics may render the picture more complex especially for emerging economies, there is still space to encourage the use of industrial policies for technological upgrade. This thesis contributes to the growing field of technology adoption determinants by providing the aforementioned framework to study such determinants. It also provides new analytical and methodological lenses to direct the future research in this growing field.