The role of general and specific training for new technology adoption and economic growth: a critical review

Aim of this article is to present an overview of the main economic literature focusing on the issue of how technology adoption and the accumulation of technical skills by firms affects the aggregate performance of economic systems. On this purpose, a differentiation between a ‘mainstream’ and a ‘non-mainstream’ approach is supposed to be crucial, the first being consistent with the neoclassical paradigm of the firm and human capital, whereas the second being consistent with the Schumpeterian paradigm and the so called view of the firm as a ‘learning organization’. Going through the basic models, the paper argues that while the mainstream approach primarily relies on a production costs analysis and on the capacity of the market and hierarchies to provide the specific skills in order for workers to deal with new technologies, non-mainstream approaches are mainly oriented to the analysis of dynamic competition and within-firm organizational learning processes that are necessary in order to cope with a changing environment.