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7 - Lack of Training: Employment Opportunities for Low-Skilled Persons from a Sociological and Microeconomic Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2009

Heike Solga
By
Heike Solga
Edited by
Karl Ulrich Mayer
Heike Solga
Affiliation:
Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
Karl Ulrich Mayer
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

Over the past three decades, low-skilled persons have received increasing attention by researchers on skill formation and labor markets across disciplines as well as by politicians. “In many OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries, discussions of the transition between education and employment are dominated by the problem of how to help a small minority of young people with severe and often multiple problems: who are doing badly at school; who experienced prolonged and regular unemployment; and who are extremely likely to experience a lifetime of low income, insecure employment, and relatively poor health” (OECD, 1999a: 26f). In all Western societies, we find an increasing labor market vulnerability of low-skilled persons over the past twenty-five years, although at different levels.

Disadvantages that low-skilled persons have in labor markets are studied in both microeconomics and sociology. Here, sociologists have quickly adopted microeconomic explanations. In doing so, however, they have ignored valuable sociology contributions toward explaining changes in the relationship between low education and labor market opportunities. This chapter delivers not competing but complementary sociological and microeconomic explanations for the increasing labor market vulnerability of low-skilled persons over the past three decades. These accounts are then used to explain variation in the vulnerability of low-skilled workers in developed countries.

This chapter starts with a portrayal of the dominant microeconomic explanation for the increase in labor market problems of low-skilled persons – the displacement argument – followed by a discussion of its shortcomings.

Type
Chapter
Information
Skill Formation
Interdisciplinary and Cross-National Perspectives
 , pp. 173 - 204
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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