Venue: Bildungszentrum der AK Wien Theresianumgasse16-18 1040 Vienna Austria

May 12-13, 2003

To mark the end of three very successful project years, EMERGENCE is holding this final international conference.

The conference follows on from the success of the previous international conferences, WEDGE (Where in the World: eWork Location in a Digital Global Economy), held in Budapest in November 2000, and WWWe (The World, the Workplace and We, the Workers), held in Brussels in April 2002. It is hosted by Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (FORBA), Vienna, Austria, in cooperation with the EMERGENCE consortium and Austrian social partner and governmental institutions.

Research findings indicate that an innovative and integrated approach is needed to describe and evaluate the emerging forms of work organisation in the digital global economy. This integrated approach involves three major aspects of work organisation: the spatial, the temporal and the contractual dimensions. It thereby helps to capture the variety of different trends in the development of ICT-supported work, and to assess their impacts on the quality of work. All conference contributions will be required to take both empirical trends and the related policy issues into account.

SPACE:
The location of e-work and the dynamics of co-operation

At a macro level this topic addresses the emerging new international division of labour. Modern ICT have opened up new options for the location of a wide range of business functions and tasks thereby increasing the competition for jobs at a global level. With the restructuring of value-added chains workers are increasingly engaged in close co-operation over distance. At a micro level this raises a range of new questions relating to requirements and opportunities of learning, working conditions and productivity.

TIME:
Autonomy and contestation of time in a virtual world

Modern ICT is said to make work not only independent of space but also of time. Emerging time arrangements impact on the work/life balance both through changes in working hours, and through the contestation of time between workers and users in telemediated service delivery. Bridging different time zones allows for a further extension of operating hours but may also put new demands on temporal availability of workers. New patterns of time both in work and consumption activities need to be carefully analysed in view of this tension between the options for independence on the one hand and, on the other, emerging new dependencies.

CONTRACT:
Borderless work and new employment relationships

Striving for organisational flexibility, companies outsource more and more activities relying on modern ICT for co-operation and control. But not only e-lancers and micro-firms are heralding a transformation of employment relations. Also within the permanent standard employment relationship, prevailing in most European societies even in new business activities, the rules of the game are subject to far-reaching changes. The emerging contractual arrangements will be analysed in view of the aims and opportunities of companies, the new needs of workers and the options available to the social partners.

Conference Languages

English and German (simultaneous translation available).

Conference sponsors

Organised and hosted by Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle (FORBA), Vienna, in association with the Austrian Trade union Federation (ÖGB) and the Vienna Chamber of Labour (AK).
 

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© 2003, Institute for Employment Studies