Where Job Values Come From: Family and Schooling Background, Cognitive Ability, and Gender

By C. Halaby. American Sociological Review, 2003

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper develops a framework for conceptualizing preferences for different job properties in terms of a tradeoff between risk and return in the pursuit of economic welfare. Following portfolio theory, job properties are viewed as having mean-variance properties with respect to the distribution of rates of growth in economic welfare. Actors may pursue a high-return, high-risk “entrepreneurial” strategy, or a low-return, low-risk “bureaucratic” strategy. An actor's choice is determined by “entrepreneurial ability” and risk preferences, which in turn are rooted in the major dimensions of family and schooling background, cognitive ability, and gender. This theory is tested by anchoring it in the Wisconsin status attainment model and then fitting rank-ordered logit models to data from the 1957 and 1992 Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey. The findings support the theory: Actors who are “advantaged” with respect to family background, schooling, cognitive ability, and gender express a preference for “entrepreneurial” as opposed to “bureaucratic” job properties. Findings also highlight the strong parallels between the process generating adult job values and the process of socioeconomic achievement itself.

Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27a022fdc1b2f6e71c1677e77474f7628912ef64

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Citations in the corpus

Social Stratification in Higher Education (2009, background): “…personality (Farkas, 2003; Heckman & Rubinstein, 2001), values and preferences (Bourdieu, 1973; G. Duncan, Kalil, Mayer, Tepper, & Payne, 2005; Halaby, 2003; Jencks & Tach, 2006; Kohn, 1977), noncognitive skills (Bowles & Gintis, 2002; Heckman & Rubinstein), and other factors that are…”
The Small Firm Effect and the Entrepreneurial Spawning of Scientists and Engineers (2010, background): “Astebro and Thompson (2007) argue that entrepreneurs (and by extension individuals joining small firms) have tastes for variety and receive non-pecuniary benefits from being a “jack of all trades.””
Entrepreneurship as a Mobility Process (2014, background): “Faced with this puzzle, many scholars offer explanations that center around distinguishing characteristics of the entrepreneurial role, such as autonomy, that might make it particularly appealing to some people (Benz and Frey 2008; Halaby 2003; Sørensen 2007b; Xu and Ruef 2004).”
Workplace Peers and Entrepreneurship (2010, unknown): “…family of origin, and should therefore be more likely to view entrepreneurship as a viable career option (Carroll and Mosakowski 1987); they also attach greater value to entrepreneurial job characteristics (Halaby 2003) and can benefit from resources and information relevant to entrepreneurship .”
Bureaucracy and Entrepreneurship: Workplace Effects on Entrepreneurial Entry (2007, background): “Halaby (2003), for example, showed that children of selfemployed fathers attached greater value to jobs that offered variety and less value to jobs that offered long-term security in the form of pensions.”
Identity and entrepreneurship: do school peers shape entrepreneurial intentions? (2010, background): “Halaby 2003; Johnson 2002; Mortimer and Lorence 1979).”