Cultural Preference Nets

In this final chapter, the authors summarize the results on the empirical analyses of attitudes, beliefs, metaphors, and preferences. They find evidence to support the contention that cultural value orientations do indeed distinguish labor market responses and the structure of those labor markets. They also note how this stability shows signs of erosion, with millennials often sharing values that transcend country boundaries. The trends in all six nations of an increasing preference for general education among younger generations has the potential of dramatically changing the skill sets of job seekers in an increasingly complex global labor market. The perils of this loss of value-added production skills are explored, as are the risks associated with the neglect of national culture as an economic organizing principle.

Skill Shortages, Skill Gaps, and Labor Demand

The focus in this chapter is on the consequences of employers’ decisions and on labor market institutions that create flexible, rigid, or segmented labor markets. The authors profile how each of the focal countries maintains culturally distinctive production functions and how these approaches to the creation of goods and services impact employment and overall economic performance. The importance of a labor market designed around the production of value-added product for export is highlighted, as is the pressure it places on renewal of knowledge and skill sets and flexible labor markets. Failures of the labor market in the forms of unemployment, underemployment, and low labor force participation have resulted in a variety of government interventions or active labor market policies. The authors examine the effectiveness of a number of these policies, including subsidies paid to employees, minimum wages, and employment subsidies to private businesses and public sector jobs.

Cultural Orientations and Economic Outcomes

In this introduction, the authors discuss the limitations that arise when economic failures like youth unemployment are perceived and studied as simply a market supply or demand problem. Rather than the result of poor choices, poor information, or market distortions, a growing body of evidence has indicated that cultural value orientation may influence economic preferences in a fashion captured by the Bourdieu paradox: while an economic calculation lies behind every action, every action cannot be reduced to an economic calculation. To address this paradox and its economic implication, the authors set out to answer three questions: (a) Do some national cultures hold on to value orientations that are more successful than others in promoting economic opportunity? (b) Does the transmission of these value orientations demonstrate stability, regardless of economic conditions? and (c) Do value orientations exert their influence on economic behaviors through stated preferences?

National and Intergenerational Similarities and Differences in Stated Preferences

In this chapter, the authors provide results from their examination of family member preferences—the linchpin between individual beliefs and attitudes and individual behaviors. They describe their stated preference experiment including the defining of choice attributes, the assignment of attribute levels, the creation of choice scenarios and choice sets, and the estimation of individuals’ utility differences on these sets using conditional logistic regression. Focusing on preference for job type, they find significant differences across countries and between generations on job choice. While in Sweden, high value is placed in jobs that require soft skills like teamwork and cooperation, in Italy and India, extrinsic values like salary and security are critical. Generational effects are also evident with millennials expressing significant disutility for jobs requiring math skills or using a second language.

Attitudes, Beliefs, Intentions, and Metaphors Over Time and in Place

Chapter 6 provides the results from the descriptive and multivariate analyses of family member responses to attitude and belief questions regarding trust, redistributive justice, human capital investment, centrality of work, intentions to work, risk-taking, cooperative attitudes/intentions, and individual achievement. The importance of metaphorical meaning is also addressed. Employing ordinary least squares, binomial, and multinomial logit regressions, the authors find that trust, risk-taking, cooperative attitudes, and individual achievement are consequential in distinguishing families in Sweden, Italy, the United States, and India. They also find strong generational effects with millennials expressing significantly different attitudes and beliefs than those of their grandparents on redistributive justice, human capital investment, the centrality of work, risk-taking, and individual achievement. They find little evidence to support the utility of cultural metaphors, as defined by Gannon and associates, as an emic device to capture cultural value orientation.

Investigating the Cultural Transmission of Economic Values

Chapter 5 lays out the authors’ operational plan for testing the conceptual model and answering the three research questions posed in Chapter 1. Following a detailed treatment of cultural transmission as an intergenerational process that can help establish cultural exogeneity, they look closely at its influence on the transition to adulthood in a cross-national context. It is then demonstrated why generational transmission requires a naturalistic sampling approach to insure that associations among family members are captured. This chapter goes on to describe the three-stage sampling process and how it aids efforts to study cultural diversity and economic performance. The family interview methodology and interview schedule are introduced, as is a statistical profile of the selected families from each focal country. How well the naturalistic sampling comports with surveys of cultural values that rely on independent, individual observations is considered.

Human Capital and Labor Supply

In Chapter 3, the authors focus on the contribution that human capital—that is, the constellation of knowledge, skills, and abilities possessed by individuals seeking employment, or who are already in the labor market—have on the structure and functioning of national economies. They examine the profound differences that cultures of general versus vocational education have on labor supply, skill and education mismatches, deficits, and surpluses. Detailed discussions of the German dual system, Sweden’s democratic education, the southern Mediterranean approach to human capital, and on-the-job training models in India and the United States are provided. The implications of a widespread shift from vocational training and apprenticeship are addressed as are the implications of this shift for the future health of the focal countries. The chapter closes with a focus on how Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, India, and the United States are addressing the issues of job creation and the encouragement of youth entrepreneurship.

The Prominence of Culture in Economic Decisions

In this chapter, the authors discuss the way culture has been scrutinized and debated in the social science literature especially in the fields of international business and economics. Following a series of classical “deep” descriptions of six focal countries, they explore the many classifications of culture that have emanated from quantitative dimensional analyses including the work of Hofstede, GLOBE, Schwartz, and others. They then turn our attention to eight value dimensions that have been linked specifically to economic performance, including social capital and cooperation, trust, redistributive justice, work centrality, risk-taking, individual achievement, education/training, and the importance of labor force attachment. In both their discussions of deep description and dimensional analyses, the authors point up how these emic (qualitative) and etic (quantitative) analyses have been used to classify Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, and the United States.