The Political Economy of Technology Adoption: Three Essays

This dissertation examines the political economy of technology adoption at the workplace, focusing on how worker representation and participatory institutions shape firms’ decisions to introduce new technologies. Departing from technologically deterministic accounts, the thesis conceptualizes technological change as a purpose-oriented and institutionally embedded process, whose adoption, implementation, and distributive effects depend on organizational arrangements and power relations within firms. Across three empirical essays, the dissertation investigates whether worker-side institutions operate primarily as sources of bargaining frictions that hinder investment, or as channels of employee voice that facilitate coordination, skill formation, and organizational adaptation. Each chapter addresses this tension in a distinct technological domain and institutional setting. The first essay analyzes the adoption of industrial robots in Italian firms, focusing on profit-sharing arrangements differentiated by occupational group. Using firm-level survey data, the analysis shows that blue-collar profit sharing is positively associated with a higher probability of robot adoption, while no comparable effect emerges for white-collar schemes. The results provide no evidence of labor substitution or increased layoffs, but instead point to a training-based mechanism: firms combining blue-collar profit sharing with digital training are significantly more likely to adopt robotics. The second essay adopts a comparative European perspective to examine the relationship between employee representation and the adoption of workplace AI technologies. Exploiting cross-country variation in employee involvement rights, the analysis shows that the association between representation and AI adoption differs systematically across institutional regimes. Where employee representatives enjoy stronger formal involvement rights, representation is more frequently linked to higher adoption rates, highlighting the conditioning role of institutional design. The third essay extends the framework to the green transition, investigating whether shop-floor employee representation is associated with environmentally sustainable investments aligned with the EU Taxonomy. Using original survey data on firms in Emilia-Romagna, the findings indicate a positive relationship between employee representation and green investments, particularly in areas such as climate mitigation and circular economy. This association is stronger in firms with younger and more educated workforces, suggesting the relevance of informational and preference-aggregation channels. Taken together, the three essays provide consistent evidence against accounts that reduce worker representation to a source of systematic hold-up or delay. Instead, the findings suggest that participatory institutions—through both economic and decision-making forms of involvement—can function as organizational infrastructures that support the adoption of complex technologies. By shaping not only how technological change is governed, but whether it occurs in the first place, worker-side institutions play an active role in contemporary processes of technological and ecological transition.