Political and Social Consequences of Qualification Mismatches: A Bounding Approach to Status Inconsistency

Jonas Wiedner

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2022, vol. 101, issue 1, 150-175

Abstract: Many employees work in jobs that do not match their level of formal education. Status inconsistency theory (SIT) argues that such mismatches result in stress, dissatisfaction, political alienation, and social withdrawal. Status inconsistency may, therefore, pose a threat to social cohesion. However, extant SIT scholarship does not fully appreciate the consequences of an identification problem due to the perfect collinearity among the effects of occupation, education, and their mismatch. I review the literature and show that prior findings depend on implicit theoretical assumptions that are often implausible once spelled out. To overcome this problem, I propose a new approach to the study of mismatches that builds on recent advances in the modeling of age, period, and cohort effects. I demonstrate how a set of relatively weak assumptions that are transparently grounded in sociological theory allows for (partial) identification of mismatch effects. The empirical analysis draws on comparable large-scale survey data from the United Kingdom (UKLHS) and Germany (GSOEP), two countries with a very different institutional organization of education to job matching. Compared with previous research, I use theoretically justified identifying assumptions and provide more rigorous evidence by addressing non-random selection into mismatch. Constrained regression models show mismatch effects on work-related identities, satisfaction, and organizational integration. Contra SIT, my results suggest that the effects of mismatches do not arise from cognitive dissonance but from an expectation formation mechanism. I find only weak evidence that mismatch effects spill over into the political domain. Despite large institutional differences, the results are similar across countries.

Keywords: age-period-cohort model; attitudes; mismatch; overeducation; satisfaction; social stratification; status inconsistency; undereducation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/243211/4/F ... tical-and-social.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:espost:243211

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().