Abstract
Work is one of the most valued activities of individuals’ lives. Attitudes toward work not only influence work-related outcomes, such as income, but also hold sway over personal well-being and satisfaction with politico-administrative institutions. Consequently, country-comparative research aimed at learning about the determinants of individuals’ work attitudes and values and their consequences is worthwhile and offers insights that are relevant for many disciplines. In this epilogue, we summarize the main insights produced by the contributions to this volume on the antecedents and consequences of work attitudes and values as well as draw some broader conclusions.
Individuals spend a considerable share of their lives at their workplaces, where they not only fulfill their tasks but learn new skills, receive feedback on their performance, and socialize with coworkers. Therefore, it is not surprising that work attitudes and values have been the subject of sustained research interest across the behavioral and social sciences. Initial research concentrated on the impact of work attitudes and values on economic development, but contemporary research has shifted focus. As of this writing, much of it centers on how attitudes and values account for employee well-being and job satisfaction and how the rise in female labor force participation affected work values as well as the economic and social implications of these values. The contribution by Duncan Gallie (this volume) gives a comprehensive overview of the state and development of research, which connects the study of work values to broader themes in political and social sciences, such as postmaterialism (Inglehart 1977), the “new politics” paradigm (Inglehart and Welzel 2005), and individualism versus collectivism (Hofstede 1984). Recent empirical research has concentrated on the determinants of work attitudes and values (e.g., Cemalcilar, Secinti, and Sumer 2018); changes in work attitudes and values (e.g., Lechner et al. 2017); and the effects of work values on various outcomes, such as career choices and career development (e.g., Sortheix, Chow, and Salmela-Aro 2015). In short, we draw from and contribute to a rich body of research on work values.
With this volume, we advance understandings of how work attitudes and values are formed and what their implications are in different countries. When selecting this specific analytical focus, we relied on both established (e.g., European Social Survey, General Social Survey, International Social Survey Programme, and World Value Survey) and new (e.g., the Cultural Pathways to Economic Self-Sufficiency and Entrepreneurship [CUPESSE] dataset; Tosun et al. 2018) country-comparative measurements of work attitudes and values and the factors potentially determining them. As a result, this volume is characterized by a diversity in empirical sources offering an extensive analysis of work attitudes and values.
Three research questions guide the contributions to this volume: (1) To what extent are parental qualities, individual traits, and individual resources relevant for the explanation of a person’s work values? (2) To what extent do work values have consequences in the political, economic, and well-being domains? and (3) To what extent do economic and cultural qualities of countries condition (a) the determinants of work values and (b) the impact of work values on self-employment, political engagement, and well-being? Having considered the research findings reported in the contributions, we now answer those questions as best we can, summarizing and discussing the main insights produced by the individual articles. We also draw some general conclusions about the policy relevance of the study of work attitudes and values—these may not be obvious at first glance, but we argue that the study of work attitudes and values does offer valuable insights for advancing policy studies and can be beneficial for producing better-designed public policies and bringing about policies’ intended outcomes.
The remainder of this piece unfolds as follows: First, we present the empirical characteristics of work attitudes and values identified in the contributions. Then, we turn to the determinants of work attitudes and values, which is followed by a discussion of their implications for a diverse set of outcomes. Subsequently, we allude to the value added of adopting a country-comparative perspective. We conclude by discussing how our findings on work attitudes and values may inform policy studies and policymaking. Overall, we are confident that the insights presented in this volume speak to established research perspectives in different (sub)disciplines of the behavioral and social sciences. And we think that we have paved the way for novel approaches to and investigations of the study of work attitudes from a country-comparative perspective.
Empirical Characteristics of Work Attitudes and Values
We begin our integrated discussion of the individual contributions by concentrating on three articles that place great emphasis on the illustration of the empirical characteristics of work values.
First is the extensive review of the pertinent literature by Duncan Gallie, in which he points out the multidimensional nature of work attitudes and values. Gallie suggests that varied facets of work values develop differently in response to social and economic changes and consequently affect individuals and their work-related behaviors differently. The selection of studies in this volume, indeed, seeks to illuminate the dynamic nature of work attitudes and values and attempts to showcase variations in the conceptualizations, determinants, and implications of work values from a cross-national perspective.
Arne Kalleberg and Peter Marsden’s in-depth analysis of how acceptance of intrinsic and extrinsic work values have changed in the United States in the past four decades uses data from multiple waves of the General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme. The authors show that work attitudes and values have developed in such a manner that Americans are mostly concerned with the security of jobs, followed by high income and opportunities for advancement. Some differences in work attitudes and values also seem attributable to aging or life course processes: when people become older and have family responsibilities, they tend to prioritize high income over other work values, which speaks nicely to the dynamic understanding of work values that Gallie postulates.
In contrast to studies that emphasize cohort effects (e.g., Hansen and Leuty 2012), Kalleberg and Marsden only find a few differences in work attitudes and values among members of different generations. This finding can potentially guide the design of policies on education and career choices, as it suggests that there is no need to adopt different policy measures for different cohorts. Rather, one or a set of carefully designed policy measures could bring about the intended policy outcomes for members of different generations.
While Kalleberg and Marsden use data for respondents based in one country over a 40-year period, the study by Bernhard Kittel, Fabian Kalleitner, and Panos Tsakloglou concentrates on regional patterns of work values in nine European countries as measured by the cross-national and cross-sectional CUPESSE data (Tosun et al. 2018). By examining the relative importance of work and nonfinancial employment commitment, their analysis reveals some interesting empirical patterns. For Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, and Spain, response patterns did not vary strongly across the regions. In contrast, the authors observe regional variation in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the UK. Italy and the UK demonstrate a substantive cross-regional variation in nonfinancial employment commitment. Therefore, it seems that the regional level provides a valuable addition to the analysis of work values, at least in Europe. Their findings also suggest that in some countries the regional level is an adequate level of policymaking to account for the marked cross-regional variation, whereas in other countries, policymaking success or failure is best attributed to the national level because there is little cross-regional variation. In more concrete terms, this finding supports the implementation of multiple policies that address different levels of government, namely, the European, the national, and the regional (see Tosun, Unt, and Wadensjö 2017; Tosun, Treib, and De Francesco 2019).
When taken together, these three contributions provide a comprehensive and nuanced empirical picture of work attitudes and values. The complementarity among the articles is strengthened by the different analytical perspectives adopted and the different scope of the respective empirical findings.
Determinants of Work Attitudes and Values
The second set of contributions concentrates on the determinants of work values and is informed and substantiated by the literature review of Duncan Gallie and the analytical perspectives presented therein. The articles on the determinants of work attitudes and values employ the same data source as the set of articles that proceeds them (i.e., the CUPESSE data), which facilitates a set of more integrated and comparable empirical findings.
The contribution by Nebi Sümer, Daniela Pauknerová, Mihaela Vancea, and Elif Manuoğlu yields important insights into how parenting behavior leads to similarity between the work values of parents and of their children. The psychological literature in particular has alluded to the importance of parenting styles for the formation of (work) attitudes and values. Using data for the Czech Republic, Spain, and Turkey, the analyses reveal several intriguing insights. Higher levels of parental warmth are found to relate to higher work values similarity between parents and young adults in all three countries. In families with high levels of psychological control, young individuals are more gender-biased and traditional in their work attitudes, which especially held true for the respondents in Spain and the Czech Republic. More generally, a positive family climate seemed to facilitate the transmission of positive attitudes and values toward work.
Zeynep Cemalcilar, Carsten Jensen, and Jale Tosun address a similar question and ask whether work attitudes and values of young people are determined by the work attitudes and values of their parents. In contrast to Sümer et al., the authors of this contribution pay more attention to the country context and dominant cultural norms than the within-family context. Analyzing data for respondents from Denmark, Germany, Turkey, and the UK, the findings reveal that parental attitudes and work values indeed are an important determinant of the young people’s work values—a result also reported by Kittel et al., who use the same data source. The second research interest of this study is whether the transmission of work values is conditioned by gender. For three of the four types of work values we examine, the effect of gender is less prominent than the authors anticipated, even for Turkey, where gender differences are more marked than in the other countries studied. The fourth outcome variable taps into a traditional understanding of women being responsible for the household and men being the primary breadwinners, and for that one a gender effect is found for all countries examined.
How does intergenerational social mobility impact young people’s attitudes regarding the meaning of work? Do future mobility expectations matter for young people’s normative attitudes regarding work and welfare? These are the research questions that Bettina Schuck and Jennifer Shore address. Using data from eleven countries, the authors show that the relationship between mobility and an individual’s views on work and welfare varies depending on the dimension of mobility (past or future), with expected future mobility exerting a stronger effect on attitudes than past mobility experiences. Self-interest, and not empathy with one’s own social origin, is shown to be the primary driver of attitudes toward the meaning of work. The results from this study can inform policymaking to the extent that policy-makers become aware that people’s behavior is guided by future expectations of their working life. Short-term measures to promote employment, then, may not suffice to induce changes in attitudes and behavior. What appears to be a more promising policy strategy is to provide a long-term perspective on mobility and give people a credible commitment that they can advance in the future.
These three set of papers, together with the contributions by Kalleberg and Marsden and Kittel et al., allow us to answer our first research question and the first part of the third research question. The contribution by Sümer et al., in particular, demonstrates the important role of parents, whereas Kalleberg and Marsden as well as Schuck and Shore show how important individual traits are. Perceiving parents and parental attitudes and values as a resource (see Kraaykamp et al., this volume), Cemalcilar, Jensen, and Tosun and Kittel et al. show that intergenerational transmission plays an indispensable role in the formation of work attitudes and values in European countries. It is interesting to note that despite differences in the (operationalization of the) outcome variables, the factors influencing work values are rather similar across countries. This can be regarded as a robust finding since the countries analyzed are characterized by marked differences concerning, for example, the role of women in society, the degree to which the countries have a collectivist culture, and the types of political economies and the welfare state regimes in place.
Implications of Work Attitudes and Values
The third set of contributions is marked by a greater diversity in terms of the data sources used, which makes the findings reported more heterogeneous but also very insightful and relevant for different literatures.
Martin Lukeš, Manuel Feldmann, and Federico Vegetti examine how work values impact different forms of labor market participation of young adults in eleven European countries. The authors report a high importance of nonpecuniary benefits among the self-employed, such as independence and creativity, and show that extrinsic values such as job security are more important for employees. Interestingly, the analysis also reveals that work centrality does not differ between the employed and the self-employed. The finding that the self-employed are foremost driven by intrinsic work values is important if we consider that policy-makers across Europe and the European Commission have promoted self-employment as a remedy for youth unemployment (Tosun 2017; Tosun, Unt, and Wadensjö 2017; Rapp, Shore, and Tosun 2018). From the perspective of this study, encouraging (young) people without a sufficient level of intrinsic motivation to become self-employed may lead to undesirable outcomes and should not be considered a standard tool for fighting youth unemployment. This does not, however, preclude this pathway for individuals who demonstrate high levels of intrinsic motivation. In other words, rather than considering self-employment as a “one-size-fits-all” model for promoting the labor market participation of young people, it should be considered for those individuals only that have the “right” motivation and mindset about it (see Haynie et al. 2010).
Taking into account the rise in youth unemployment in the wake of the Great Recession (see Tosun, Wetzel, and Zapryanova 2014), Emily Rainsford, William Maloney, and Sebastian Popa examine how experiences of unemployment and low-quality work impact young adults’ work values. The latter aspect is a particularly welcome feature of this analysis since research has shown that young people in Europe have faced various nonstandard forms of employment such as “zero-hour” contracts (see Montgomery et al. 2017). Analyzing eleven European countries, this study reports a positive effect on extrinsic work values for one dimension of low-quality work conditions—overqualification. The authors also show that age has a conditioning effect on how unemployment and low-quality work affects work values: the younger the people affected, the greater the impact. These findings underline the general importance of preventing very young people from experiencing unemployment and low-quality working conditions to avoid scarring that might hurt future career paths, which is reflected in recent policies adopted to promote youth employment (see Tosun, Unt, and Wadensjö 2017; Tosun, Treib, and De Francesco 2019).
Mark Visser, Maurice Gesthuizen, and Gerbert Kraaykamp use a particularly rich database with respondents based in thirty-one countries to examine to what extent extrinsic and intrinsic work values are associated with nonelectoral political participation. The results of this analysis show that people who are extrinsically motivated are less politically active, while people who are intrinsically motivated are more politically active, which is a relevant finding for political participation research. However, the relationships between these variables are moderated by the national wealth level: in less affluent countries, the relationships are weaker. Similar to Sümer et al., Visser, Gesthuizen, and Kraaykamp also pay attention to the prevalent cultures in the countries analyzed and reveal that the negative effect of extrinsic work values and the positive effect of intrinsic work values on political participation seem stronger in individualistic countries.
The study by Visser, Gesthuizen, and Kraaykamp aligns with the contribution by Anna Diamantopoulou and Kyriakos Pierrakakis, in which the authors allude to another political consequence of the perception of work attitudes and values. The authors show that work values have the potential to be instrumentalized politically and demonstrate this point by the public and political discourses in the context of the Great Recession, when the Greek government asked for bailouts to prevent state bankruptcy (see Tosun, Wetzel, and Zapryanova 2014). This contribution shows that perceptions of work attitudes and values are relevant to political debate and policy, which is why it is important for political scientists to engage with the topic of work values.
Using a worldwide sample, Anja Van den Broeck, Arne Vanderstukken, Karin Proost, Bert Schreurs, and Maarten Vansteenkiste analyze the predictive power of work values for life satisfaction, happiness, and well-being of young people. Their findings demonstrate that the type of work values held by a young person and the type of values prevailing in his or her environment account for significant variation in a person’s perceptions. What is important is that intrinsic work values generally show more positive consequences for people’s lives than extrinsic work values.
This set of contributions helps to answer the second research question and the second part of the third research question. First, for all countries under investigation, work values have consequences in various domains of public and private life. Lukeš Feldmann, and Vegetti show how important work values are for determining the different types of labor market participation (employed vs. self-employed) of young people. Rainsford et al. contribute a complementary perspective by showing how negative labor market experiences at a (very) young age affect work values. The political domain is discussed by Visser, Gesthuizen, and Kraaykamp as well as Diamantopoulou and Pierrakakis, whereas Van den Broeck et al. add the individuals’ well-being perspective. Visser, Gesthuizen, and Kraaykamp are most explicit in theorizing, highlighting, and discussing the conditioning effects of countries. The other studies do not reveal country-specific effects. In sum, these contributions excel in showing the diverse nature of the implications of work values for different domains and in varying country contexts.
Robustness of the Findings across Countries
We started this article by expressing that using a country-comparative perspective in studying work values is a valuable approach. The collection of studies presented in this special issue shows that the outcome variables vary, but the potential determinants of those variables are relatively similar across countries. Some of the contributions find a conditioning effect of countries or country-level characteristics (e.g., Visser, Gesthuizen, and Kraaykamp, this volume), but altogether the findings reported here are fairly robust across countries. This is a result we initially did not expect to materialize in such a clear manner.
Yet the methodological contribution by Maurice Gesthuizen, Daniel Kovarek, and Carolin Rapp cautions about the validity of the scales used in most country-comparative surveys for drawing cross-country conclusions. While the analysis the authors provide is compelling and will certainly guide future studies employing cross-country survey data, we are confident that the use of many different data sources in this volume increases the level of confidence in the results reported. Indeed, the overall empirical picture still holds true if we vary the data sources that contributors used. The relationships uncovered by the articles are an indication of underlying causal mechanisms, which need to be tested in a systematic fashion by subsequent investigations.
Lessons for Policy Studies and Policymaking
The contributions to this volume of
Target group behavior is among the different components of the policy implementation process that Winter (2012) and Vancoppenolle, Sætren, and Hupe (2015) identify. It is about the role the policy addressees play in the implementation process, which includes their actions as well their needs. With social benefits, for example, the target group’s involvement in the implementation process consists of filing a request and complying with the conditions attached to the granting of the benefits (e.g., regular appointments with case managers; see Shore and Tosun 2019). With other policy types, implementation may entail more substantive changes to the behavior of the target group. Policy success is then the degree to which the behavioral changes attained correspond to those intended—which, however, is not just a matter of objective measurement, but also a matter of presentation and framing (see McConnell 2010). Nonetheless, policies cannot be considered as successful if they fail to bring about any behavioral change.
Despite the omission of the policy perspective from the studies that constitute this issue, our findings on the patterns and determinants of work attitudes and values have important implications for this particular subdiscipline of political science. We demonstrate this point by drawing on the conceptual literature on policy design. For example, Chindarkar, Howlett, and Ramesh (2017) stress the importance of governance capacity and analytical capacity for the quality of policy design. When governance and analytical capacity are high, the authors expect capable design; while in the opposite constellation, where both capacities are low, poor design is expected. When the governance capacity is high, but the analytical capacity low, capable political design is the most likely outcome, which is characterized by a better political quality of the design than quality of the policy content. The complementary scenario (governance capacity low, analytical capacity high) is likely to lead to a poor political design; that is, the quality of the policy is likely to be good, but it may not be politically feasible, and it may result in political conflict, which prevents the policy from being adopted in cabinet and/or parliament.
Attitudes and values appear particularly important for employment policy. When looking at the recent measures taken to promote (youth) employment in Europe, we find that these are supply-side oriented (de la Porte and Jacobsson 2012; Tosun 2017; Tosun, Unt, and Wadensjö 2017; Shore and Tosun 2019; Tosun, Treib, and De Francesco 2019); that is, they aim to increase the employability of jobseekers through improving their skills and qualifications as well as to provide incentive to work rather than to receive welfare benefits (see, e.g., Bonoli 2010; Dinan 2019). The supply-side orientation of employment policies means that state agencies can facilitate measures and programs in which jobseekers participate, but it is in the end the individuals who need to make decisions and engage in the programs provided. If the program offered operates on the wrong premise (e.g., aims to provide a profound and extensive training whereas the jobseeker is interested in short-term, intensive training), it can produce suboptimal policy results. In this context, Tosun and Hörisch (2019) show that active labor market policies provide a good case for contrasting the perceptions of jobseekers with those of policy-makers. Considering the cost of these measures and the negative effects of (long-term) unemployment, taking the jobseekers’ attitudes into account is worthwhile.
Education and higher education policy may also rely on misconceptions about young people’s work attitudes and values. The German apprenticeship model, for example, has been praised for smoothing out school-to-work transitions, especially in the context of the Great Recession (Protsch and Solga 2017, 387). However, the results of a survey conducted by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) shows that more than one-third of apprenticeship training positions have not been filled due to a lack of applications (in 2018, 17,000 companies did not receive a single application) or due to a wrong fit between the position and the applicants’ skills (DIHK 2018, 3). One of the reasons for the decreasing number of applications is that young people are becoming more interested in higher education, which holds the promise of higher income and more favorable working conditions (e.g., security or working hours).
The increase in higher education participation can be regarded as a policy success, since policy decisions were geared toward stimulating such participation. For many years, Germany was regarded as an exceptional case due to its low participation rates in higher education (see Powell and Solga 2011). From that perspective, striving for changes in young people’s work attitudes and values is plausible and even desirable. However, for the German apprenticeship model, it evidently bears a risk, which needs to be addressed by policy-makers. To balance this trade-off, the apprenticeship model may need to become more attractive, for example, in terms of the apprentices’ income or working hours. This example shows that a better understanding of attitudes and values on work can indeed help in the design of better policies related to (higher) education and employment. A “better” design means that the intended policy goals can be attained as the intended changes in the individuals’ behavior are brought about.
In sum, considering ways to integrate the role of attitudes and values into policy studies, which to date has hardly been endeavored, is promising. Research in public policy has advanced to include the political perspective, but it still concentrates on policy-makers and does not pay (sufficient) attention to policy target groups. In this article, we limited our discussion to the literature on policy design to illustrate the potential for cross-fertilization, but there are other themes in policy studies that are equally worth discussing from the perspective of work values. The “behavioral turn” in public policy that relies on concepts such as
Footnotes
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We thank all external reviewers who contributed to this volume of
Jale Tosun is a professor at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research focuses on comparative public policy, international political economy, and public administration.
Gerbert Kraaykamp is a professor of empirical sociology in the Department of Sociology at Radboud University in the Netherlands. His major research interests include educational inequality, intergenerational transmission, and health inequality. He has published widely on these subjects in international scientific journals.
Zeynep Cemalcılar is an associate professor of social psychology at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. Her most recent research focuses on youth autonomy and self-sufficiency, subjective socioeconomic status, brief social psychological interventions, and technology in the social life.