Conclusion and Discussion

Two major conclusions can be drawn from the overall pattern of results. First, firms in the IS have realized that, in order to be successful, they must combine ICT with training and organizational transformation. The introduction of ICT affects skill requirements and finally employment policy that focuses on employees' upskilling through increased training.

Second, flexible working arrangements such as self-employment, temporary employment, and subcontracting are becoming increasingly prominent in the shift towards the IS. Different types of flexible staff appear to have different treatment concerning training policies.

More precisely, temporaries are mostly low-skilled workers used by firms to absorb volume fluctuations accomplishing well-defined, elementary tasks. They are mainly used as a source of quantitative flexibility. Therefore firms do not consider investing to their skills and qualifications through training. While it may be a rational response for firms not to train such workers if they are not expected to remain long at the firm nor to offer a new set of competencies, it does raise the question of how skills of temporaries may be improved, securing their career prospects.

Independent contractors on the other hand are highly educated, high-skilled individuals used by firms to increase their capacity to unanticipated conditions, implying new sets of competencies. They are mainly used as a source of qualitative flexibility. They receive work-related training in order to become integrated, thus even better performing. The relationship between independent contractors and host firms might be seen as form of co-operative endeavor characterized by reciprocal patterns of exchange and thus network (Powell, 1990). Competencies developed in the network are expected to result in benefits for every partner. Firms achieve better performance, and independent contractors enjoy improvement of their skills and high career opportunities.

Subcontracting would have been expected to present the same results as the use of independent contractors. However, because subcontracting is not yet very developed in Greece and is mainly used for auxiliary tasks, explicit inference could not be made.

Overall the research shows that Greek firms are mobilized towards the demands of the digital era, combining: (a) training programs to enhance employees' skills and ultimately functional flexibility, and (b) use of numerically flexible workers to achieve quantitative and qualitative flexibility.

The combination of functional and numerical flexibility goes beyond the coreperiphery model, as external workers are very often high-skilled individuals that operate on core or extended-core jobs and benefit from training. However, results suggest that even though no distinct labor sectors exist between permanent and flexible workers, in terms of training, segmentation exists between advantageous and disadvantageous flexible workers with different career opportunities.

In the IS the world of work must provide the right framework to allow firms more flexibility through providing security to workers, in order to respond to the needs of the knowledge-based production of goods and services. In this society, however, the concept of security of workers has to be developed and broadened, focusing more on security based on employability, based in its own turn on continuous skills upgrade, than on the security of the individual's workplace. It is not clear yet how this balance could be achieved. The precise nature of the equation should be investigated in the broader context of networks and competition. This issue represents fertile directions for future investigations, and poses policy challenges regarding organization and institutions of the labor market. One of the foremost priorities of policy makers should be to develop systems that ensure workers' right to employability based on the improvement of their skills in the context of all flexible working practices.