Hal Salzman is Professor of Public Policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School and Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. His research focuses on science and engineering labor markets, workplace restructuring, skill requirements, and globalization of innovation, engineering and technology design. Recently he has been writing on the science and technology policy implications of his research. A current project, as Principal Investigator, examines science and engineering education and careers and is funded by the Sloan Foundation. This project builds on Salzman’s previous research on science and engineering education and the workforce (see, for example, “Making the Grade” in Nature).

His other area of research and teaching is on human capital development, firm strategy, and community sustainability in the Arctic. He is Principal Investigator of an International Polar Year grant from the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Science Program/Office of Polar Programs.

Past projects include Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation-funded project on globalization, innovation, and human capital; this work has continued in his research on “collaborative advantage” in globalization, engineering, technology entrepreneurship (research funded by the National Science Foundation and Kauffman Foundation, with Leonard Lynn of Case Western Reserve University and conducted with colleagues in the U.S., Germany, Japan, China, India, and Latin America). Prof. Salzman has conducted a number of studies of the IT industry, on both software design and work practices and on labor force issues in the IT industry. A recently completed project was on corporate restructuring and the impact on low-wage jobs and skills. His publications include Software By Design: Shaping Technology and the Workplace (Oxford University Press) and articles on issues of technology, skills, and the workplace, including “Collaborative Advantage” (in Issues in Science and Technology), “Under Construction: The Continuing Evolution of Job Structures in Call Centers,” in Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, “Too Many Cooks?: Changing Wages and Job Ladders in the Food Industry.Regional Review, and forthcoming, Technology Entrepreneurs in the Emerging Economies: The new shape of global innovation.

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Skill Development and Sustainable Prosperity: Cumulative and Collective Careers versus Skill-Biased Technical Change

Paper Working Paper Series | | Dec 2014

There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find.