Comparing Employer Attractiveness of Public Sector Organizations to Nonprofit and Private Sector Organizations: An Experimental Study in Germany and the U.S.

Sector preferences in job choice have rarely been tested empirically across different administrative systems. We address this gap and apply a between-subject experimental design to examine the attractiveness of public, private, and nonprofit employers in two countries in different administrative traditions. Respondents ( n = 362) from an Anglo-Saxon (i.e., the U.S.) and continental European country (i.e., Germany) were exposed to job advertisements that only differed in the employer’s sector affiliation, with other job attributes, such as payment and working hours, held constant. Contrary to expectations, and consistently across the two country samples, respondents evaluated public sector jobs more positively compared to vacancies in the private sector. In contrast, we found no such comparative advantage of public over nonprofit employers. By providing counterevidence to the prevalence of negative attitudes toward public organizations, our study warns against overgeneralizing previous findings on negativity biases to the context of employer attractiveness.

Liechtenstein

Liechtenstein is the only continental European country to have adopted and codified the common law trust. The Liechtenstein trust (‘Treuhänderschaft’) was codified in 1926 in the Law on Persons and Companies (‘PGR’) with clear inspiration from the English Trustee Act 1925. Some English common law rules have been enacted (eg the equitable rules on tracing (‘Spurfolge’; Art 912 (3) PGR, § 30 TrUG). In 1928 the Law regarding Trust Enterprises (abbreviated as ‘TrUG’) was passed. This law was modelled on the so-called Massachusetts Business Trust and inserted in the PGR as Art 932a and consists of 170 paragraphs.

Gender and Class in the Twentieth Century

Few nonspecialists know that Belgium was the first continental European country to benefit and suffer from the Industrial Revolution. Resulting in part from this heritage and also building on an even older tradition of textile manufacturing dating back to the High Middle Ages, Belgium is home to a number of high-quality museums and institutions showcasing and researching the age of industry and its corresponding social movements. Two such organizations are the Archive and Museum of the Socialist Workers Movement (AMSAB) and the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textiles (MIAT) in the city of Ghent. On April 27–30, 1999, these two institutions joined forces to organize an international conference on “Gender and Class in the 20th Century.” For several days, participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and Belgium gathered to listen and respond to a variety of presentations covering the whole range of issues related to the conference theme, from sexuality at the point of production to the discursive construction of poverty as female in the contemporary global age.