The present study advances a novel productivity function of knowledge workers. Cognitive science studies provide clear evidence that, for a given event, there is a difference between a worker's cognitive time and physical clock time; this difference gives rise to a cognitive time distortion. The proposed productivity function accounts for workers' dual experiences of time and the kinds of contracts utilized by an economic organization and its customers and workers. This function shows-for the first time and contrary to intuition-that, given certain conditions, workers' cognitive time and the form of contracts utilized are the only conditioners of knowledge worker productivity. The proposed productivity function unearths a hidden economic lever effect whereby a minor degree of time distortion generates a significant level of worker inefficiency. This constitutes a novel contribution to the literature on knowledge worker productivity.

Increasing the fuel efficiency of industrial machines through digitalization can enable the transport and logistics sector to overcome challenges such as low productivity growth and increasing CO2 emissions. Modern digitalized machines with embedded sensors that collect and transmit operational data have opened up new avenues for the identification of more efficient machine use. While existing studies of industrial machines have mostly focused on one or a few conditioning factors at a time, this study took a complementary approach, using a large set of known factors that simultaneously conditioned both the fuel consumption and productivity of medium-range forklifts (n = 285) that operated in a natural industrial setting for one full year. The results confirm the importance of a set of factors, including aspects related to the vehicles’ travels, drivers, operations, workload spectra, and contextual factors, such as industry and country. As a novel contribution, this study shows that the key conditioning factors interact with each other in a non-linear and non-additive manner. This means that addressing one factor at a time might not provide optimal fuel consumption, and instead all factors need to be addressed simultaneously as a system.

Factors affecting productivity and particularly IT‑enabled productivity increase have been and still remain the major concern for many business sectors. While previously researchers investigated what factors and their complementary relationships affect organizational productivity, organizational economists came to the conclusion that an organization cannot be regarded anymore as a black box since it is not an organization per se that conducts the very work but its resources with the basic elements being a single worker and a single IT system. Currently, it is proposed that we understand organizational internal mechanisms and their functioning for productivity through the lens of complementarity theory and maintain that when factors are synchronized correctly they can bring significant productivity increase. Identification of the complementarity factors and their synchronization bring, however, a major challenge for research methodology. Unlike conventional studies where a few variables independent of each other cause a reaction to dependent variables, in the context of complementarities, the assumption is closer to the real‑world experiences where a set of factors interact with each other to affect one or several dependent variables. The present paper addresses this difficulty of researching complementary factors for an individual knowledge worker and their productivity. The approach taken here is to use multiple and different research methods in a complementary manner, so that the results from each study of the same kind of phenomenon uncover new insights that cannot be derived from any such single study. The results from this multi‑method approach demonstrate new insights into the interplay between the studied factors that condition the productivity of knowledge workers and show the importance of analysing a complex phenomenon with complementary research methods. 

Numerous studies have attempted to determine factors that condition the IT-enabled productivity of information workers but have not yet arrived at a comprehensive conclusion. A so-called complementarity systems approach has been proposed recently, holding that a number of factors need to be managed in a deliberately synchronized manner in order to generate productivity gains from such workers. However, this proposal does not provide specifications for how such synchronization must be conducted and researched. To remedy this gap, this research conducts two parallel and differently designed studies: a longitudinal quasi-randomized field experiment and a well-controlled online experiment. Regarded jointly, each study offers insights into the investigated phenomenon that the other does not, indicating that both studies complement each other. In particular, these two different research approaches to study the complementarities of productive IT use help us to establish how further research design should be developed to investigate individual productivity when a new, more aligned IT system in a company is used together with complementary factors. Moreover, the results from both studies jointly demonstrate that a mandatory context of IT use might provide better access to individuals with both adaptive and innovative cognitive styles than a voluntary working environment. Finally, both studies demonstrate that more detailed research is needed to understand how the productivity of individuals differs when inappropriate cognitive styles are included in complementarity set-ups. Therefore, the two studies offer new insights into the interplay between the studied factors that condition the productivity of information workers and show the importance of analysing a complex phenomenon with multiple, different, and complementary research designs, as each design has inherent conditions with opportunities and limitations, in order to reveal characteristics about the phenomenon being investigated.

During the last few decades, the PSS literature has documented industrial firms’ transformation from the product dominant logic of business to product-service bundles constituted by machines and related services. This transformation has had several dramatic implications on firms’ profitability, strategy, operations, organizational setting, sales and marketing approaches, and R&D practices. However, more recently, industrial firms have started to adopt various smart technologies that are embedded within the PSS. The use of smart technologies in PSS gives rise to the new types of PSS that are referred to in this paper as Smart PSS. Based on a literature review of 43 papers from relevant academic fields, this paper seeks answer to the following research question: what are the value creating features of smart product service systems (Smart PSS) in industrial firms? We synthesize the knowledge on Smart PSS to provide a definition and show the distinctive features of Smart PSS and propose an agenda for future research.

The identification of the factors that condition a software programmer’s productivity remains a key challenge for both scholars and practitioners. While a number of studies have focused on the impact of one or a few particular factors, the way these factors jointly condition programmer productivity is still unknown. This paper presents a conceptual model aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the factors that complement each other to govern the productivity of a software programmer. The model is based on complementarity theory and its systems approach and addresses an individual worker’s productivity, which accounts for cognitive, technological, and organizational characteristics. The analyzed factors are organized into a system of complementarities, offering two propositions that specify the conditions of a programmer’s productivity. The model’s key contribution lies in its unique configuration of two systems of complementarities, which have the potential to add to the literature on the productivity of software programmers. The proposed model can be employed as a guidance for the design of empirical investigations of the conditions of individual software programmers’ productivity as well as information worker productivity in general.

The recent developments and adoptions of digital technologies give rise to the growth of information economies, understood as an aggregate of economic activities that produce informational outputs. Several key characteristics of an information economy differ to the conventional economic wisdom derived from the industrial age, which may impose governmental policy implications and therefore constitutes a key question: how to govern the newly emerged information economy with the thinking of the industrial age economy. Resolving this problem requires, among others, comprehensive understanding of information economies. To that end, Sweden is among the most advanced adopters of digital technologies and represents therefore a suitable empirical base for the investigation of an information economy. This paper offers preliminary results from a first ever account of the Swedish information economy in terms of its value created, jobs and wages; this account shows that the Swedish economy is dominated by its information economy, which requires a careful attention of policy makers.

It is well known that most of the largest economies in the world are becoming information economies (understood as an aggregate of economic activities that produce information outputs) in terms of value added (GNP) and jobs. Sweden is among the most advanced adopters of ICT and represents therefore a suitable empirical base for the investigation of an information economy. The data reveal that the largest part of the Swedish economy in terms of GNP value added is constituted by information services. This study presents some surprising economic structures never before uncovered, which are discussed here and then contextualized in terms of implications for public policy making. 

This paper presents preliminary results from an ongoing empirical study that seeks to understand the relationship between IT-complementary factors and the individual productivity of information workers. Although there is substantial evidence of positive IT complementarity effects on productivity at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of the economy, we still lack knowledge on the configuration of these factors at the individual level. To investigate this gap, we have designed a new research model of an information worker’s individual productivity when an IT system is used jointly and synchronously with both individual and organizational factors. The model is tested in a longitudinal field study of sales operations of an international pharmaceutical company with a multi sub-case setup. While we continue to collect data, preliminary findings from difference-in-difference analysis are presented here and demonstrate that the introduction of a “full” set of IT complementarities has had a positive and significant effect on the number of sales calls performed.