Perceptions of employability among London’s low-paid: ‘Self-determination’ or ethnicity?

Richard Croucher, Sumeetra Ramakrishnan, Marian Rizov and Diana Benzinger
Additional contact information
Richard Croucher: Middlesex University, UK
Sumeetra Ramakrishnan: Middlesex University, UK
Diana Benzinger: Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2018, vol. 39, issue 1, 109-130

Abstract: This article investigates how ethnicity, gender and other characteristics affect low-paid workers’ perceptions of their employability in London’s labour market, examining self-efficacy, ethnic and dual labour market theories. The authors find that perceptions vary considerably, both between genders and ethnicities and in the extent to which they are ‘justified’ by human capital attributes. Optimism varies between genders and ethnic groups but individuals’ perceptions vary to an even greater extent within genders and ethnic groups. Hence, individual-level ‘self-determination’ explanations of these perceptions appear to have greatest explanatory power in this specific context, although ethnic theories also have utility.

Keywords: Diversity; dual labour market; employability; human capital; labour economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X15609672 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:39:y:2018:i:1:p:109-130

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X15609672

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().