The Effect of Fixed-Term Employment on Well-Being: Disentangling the Micro-Mechanisms and the Moderating Role of Social
- PDF / 1,069,087 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 29 Downloads / 175 Views
The Effect of Fixed‑Term Employment on Well‑Being: Disentangling the Micro‑Mechanisms and the Moderating Role of Social Cohesion Sonja Scheuring1 Accepted: 20 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper examines the impact of fixed-term employment on well-being from a crossnational comparative perspective by testing (1) the effect heterogeneity across European countries, (2) to which extent Jahoda’s Latent Deprivation Model provides a sufficient micro-level explanation for the underlying mechanisms and (3) whether the macro-level factor of social cohesion weakens the micro-level impacts. We investigate the effects in both an upwards (permanent employment) and a downwards (unemployment) comparative control group design. Due to the mediating role of social contacts on the micro-level, we assume social cohesion on the country-level to moderate the main effects: A high degree of societal affiliation should substitute the function of social contacts in the work environment of individuals. Using microdata from the European Social Survey (ESS) 2012 for 23 countries and applying multilevel estimation procedures, we find that there is a remarkable variation in the effects across countries. Even though in each country fixed-term employees have a lower subjective well-being compared to permanent ones, the point estimates vary from .17 to 1.19 units. When comparing fixed-term employees to unemployed individuals, the coefficients even range from − .27 to 1.25 units. More specifically, a negative effect indicates that having a fixed-term contract is worse than unemployment in some countries. Moreover, pooled linear regression models reveal that Jahoda’s Latent Deprivation Model explains about three-quarters of the micro-level effect sizes for both directions. Eventually, social cohesion on the country-level diminishes the individual-level well-being differences between fixed-term employees and permanent individuals but not between fixed-term employees and the unemployed. Keywords Fixed-term employment · Well-being · Social cohesion · Multilevel estimation · Mediation analysis
* Sonja Scheuring sonja.scheuring@uni‑bamberg.de 1
Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Feldkirchenstraße 21, 96045 Bamberg, Germany
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
S. Scheuring
1 Introduction Job insecurity has become a key characteristic of modern labor markets in the last few decades and its importance is even assumed to keep on rising (Kalleberg 2018). Fixed-term employment, i.e. jobs based on contracts with a predetermined expiry date, is one of the most visible manifestations of job insecurity. Compared to life-long employment, which used to be the standard employment relationship, fixed-term contracts can be expected to negatively affect individuals in many ways. Fixed-term employees, hereinafter also referred to as temporary employees, are limited in their plannability concerning important decisions like homeownership or family formation and consequently in the perceived controllability of their lives (Burchell 1994). Due to this
Data Loading...
