Work in the Welfare State: Exploring the Relationship between National Welfare Institutions and Individual Work Attitudes
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2009
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Haverford College. Department of Economics
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Individual labor market decisions are a complex function of personal characteristics, cultural values, and occupational environments. Social scientists have tried to measure the extent to which an individual is invested and/or committed to his or her job with a theoretical construct known as work centrality. Long thought to be a determined by occupation-specific factors and individual personality, this paper seeks to examine the relationships between national social welfare institutions and individual work centrality. In other words, does the level of a country's social spending or the extent of the national safety next extended to its citizens bear any relation to how important those citizens view work in their lives, and which job characteristics they identify as highly important. Using individual survey data from the World Values Survey and country-level data OECD, ILO, and Penn World Tables, I use logistic regression analysis to study the relationship between three widely used measures of comparative welfare states and a self-identified work centrality measured provided by a WVS survey question. I further analyze the possible effects of national social welfare provision on which types of job characteristics people find important in the workplace. My results show that those living in countries with more developed social welfare institutions tend to display higher levels of work centrality, and tend to value extrinsic job characteristics like salary, promotion chances, and security less than their counterparts living in nations where the welfare state is relatively weak.