Working in the 21st Century. The Coronavirus Crisis: A Driver of Digitalisation, Teleworking, and Innovation, with Unintended Social Consequences

Dimitrios Kiriakou,Amaya Erro-Garcés,Francisco Javier Pinilla García,Antonio López Peláez

doi:10.3390/info12090377

Abstract

(1) Background: This article seeks to shed a light on the innovation, digitalisation, and teleworking processes that have occurred because of the coronavirus crisis. (2) Methods: To this end, we analyse data from Eurostat (2020), the European Companies Survey (2013; 2019) and the Living, Working and COVID-19 Dataset (2020), the latter two gathered by Eurofound. (3) Results: Our main findings reveal that COVID-19 has accelerated a process of digitalisation that has produced relevant changes in labour relations and, consequently, in companies’ organisation. (4) Conclusions: In short, home confinement has had a profound impact on work and occupational risks.

Highlights

Companies have been forced to innovate and digitise their operative activities in a context characterised by a low level of innovation, such as the Spanish situation where innovative management practices are similar to the European path, the 2008 economic crisis affected the Spanish economy to a greater extent than other European economies [5,6]
These results are consistent with the previous literature; Ref. [4] concluded that COVID-19 had resulted in a huge growth in teleworking in Spain, and Ref. [20] showed the same for Lithuania in March 2020
It is important that this issue be urgently addressed, because it will become increasingly relevant in a society where the teleworking population has gone from

Summary

Introduction

The coronavirus pandemic is having a profound impact, with far-reaching implications for the way people live and work across Europe and all around the world [1,2]. From the perspective of the sociology of work and organisations, COVID-19 has been managed with two complementary strategies: home confinement of the population as a health strategy and teleworking as an organisational strategy [3,4]. Companies have been forced to innovate and digitise their operative activities in a context characterised by a low level of innovation, such as the Spanish situation where innovative management practices are similar to the European path, the 2008 economic crisis affected the Spanish economy to a greater extent than other European economies [5,6]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion