Culture, skills, job tasks and inequality

George Farkas

Chapter 3 in A Research Agenda for Skills and Inequality, 2023, pp 37-50 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter describes the overlap between the fields of sociology and economics in how they apply the concepts of culture, skills, job tasks and inequality to the study of employment and earnings. As described by human capital economists and cultural capital sociologists, cognitive and noncognitive skills are demanded by jobs and occupations and supplied by workers. The two fields agree that cognitive skills are measured by test scores and that noncognitive skills refer to psychologists’ “Big Five” personality characteristics – emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. When these, plus cognitive skill, are correlated with job performance, the highest correlation is with cognitive skill, with conscientiousness second. Economists have measured variation in these across time and national groups, and related these to variation in inequality and economic growth. They focus on the supply and demand for worker skills, while sociologists have emphasized labor market power relations as determinants.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Education; Geography; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800378469/9781800378469.00009.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20326_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().