Technological Forecasting and Social Change · 2023 · 127 citations · 74 references
The literature on automation’s impact on employment is highly complex, varying across multiple levels of analysis and methodological approaches, making it difficult to draw clear conclusions. This paper reviews prior studies on automation technologies’ impact on employment and identifies research gaps and a future research agenda. The authors conducted a structured systematic review, retrieving 102 publications from Web of Science, Scopus, and hand searches. The review found inconsistent and inconclusive results, with few clear findings and an unclear impact of automation technologies across many levels of analysis.
This paper aims to review prior studies investigating how automation technologies affect employment. Our structured systematic review resulted in 102 publications recovered from Web of Science, Scopus and hand searching. The literature investigating how automation technologies affect employment is extremely complex and detailed, given that the impact of automation is evaluated at different levels of analysis (i.e., global, international, continental, country, regional, labour market, industry, firm, occupational, worker, and work activities) by adopting alternative methods (i.e., estimating the probability of automation or the net impact of employment) and, for some levels of analysis, the impact of each specific type of automation technology is evaluated. Moreover, the results are often inconsistent and inconclusive since only few clear results emerge and the impact of automation technologies is unclear for many levels of analysis. Research gaps and future research agenda are identified and discussed based on previous evidence.
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Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement
David Moher, A. Liberati, Jennifer Tetzlaff et al. · BMJ · 2009 · 82.3K citations · Full text