A configurational approach to job quality analysis: forms of inequalities at work in Europe

ABSTRACT

While job quality is often described in a binary way, this article proposes a configurational approach to account for the interactions between the subjective and objective dimensions and to combine the relations between the micro-, meso- and macro-level variables in a single frame. Based on data from the EWCS (2015) in 29 European countries, this article uses a cluster analysis to identify five configurations of job quality in Europe. This approach renews the study of job quality and reveals differentiated registers of relationships to work, which are dependent on micro-level variables as well as meso-level variables (the context of the respondent’s company) and macro-level variables. The perception of job quality differs markedly between high-skilled occupations and low-skilled occupations, but there is also a segmentation of jobs at both the middle and the bottom of the European social space. Belonging to the public sector is a determining factor in the existence of critical relationships to jobs.

KEYWORDS:

• Job quality
• European social space
• public sector
• configuration
• cluster analysis

Acknowledgements

We thank Milan-Bouchet Valat, Cédric Hugrée, and Philippe Askenazy for their valuable comments. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier versions of this article. We thank Sam Ferguson for the translation of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) data are produced by Eurofound. The EWCS data are produced by Eurofound. They are available on the UK Data Service: https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7363-8.

The replication package is available on: Pénissat, É., Rodrigues, C., & Spire, A. (2023). Replication package for the paper ‘A configurational approach to job quality analysis: forms of inequalities at work in Europe’ (Version 1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10221412.

Notes

1 Statistical processing was produced in R language, using Rstudio software published by Posit society. The analysis were produced with the help of functions from the following packages: tidyverse to tidy data, corrplot for correlation matrix and representation, questionr and survey for weighted data, stats for kmeans clustering, factoMineR and factoExtra for geometrical analysis, knitr and kableExtra for table presentation, patchwork for plots presentation and broom and broom.helpers for presentation of logit results. We would like to thank all the creators and contributors.

2 Which distributions are presented in appendix 1 and correlations two by two in appendix 2.

3 35.2% of German workers belong to this group, compared to 26.3% for all Continental countries (Table 3).