Poltier Jérémie
Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Front Sociol. 2025 Jun 18;10:1577352. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1577352. eCollection 2025.
An individual's early labor market experience and the associated workplace socialization constitute an important time in a person's life. During those years, the labor market entrant interacts with her superiors, her senior colleagues and with her firm's broader ecosystem. During this process, she is exposed to discourses that emphasize the firm's interests, as well as a narrative that tends to conflate the firm's interests and the interests of its employees, which likely contributes to shape her economic policy preferences. This paper asks the following questions: how does early socialization in the workplace contribute to shape economic attitudes, and does it have a lasting impact on these attitudes? Using data from the Swiss Household Panel, I investigate the trajectory of young individuals during their early years on the labor market to gain insight about the interplay between occupational characteristics and economic attitudes. In line with recent findings in the trade exposure literature that emphasize the association between exposure to foreign demand and concerns over international competitiveness, I find that labor market entrants in occupations associated with export-dependent sectors develop hostile preferences vis-à-vis social spending. Taking advantage of the panel structure of the data, I show that while individuals do self-select into occupations based on pre-existing preferences-confirming that the self-selection mechanism is relevant to the occupation-preferences link-, they also adjust these preferences as a result of their early labor market experience-confirming the importance of the socialization mechanism.
一个人的早期劳动力市场经历以及与之相关的职场社会化过程，构成了其人生中的一个重要阶段。在那些年里，初入劳动力市场的人与上级、资深同事以及公司更广泛的生态系统进行互动。在此过程中，她接触到强调公司利益的论述，以及一种倾向于将公司利益与员工利益混为一谈的叙事，这可能有助于塑造她的经济政策偏好。本文提出以下问题：职场早期社会化如何有助于塑造经济态度，以及它对这些态度是否有持久影响？利用瑞士家庭小组的数据，我研究了年轻人在劳动力市场早期阶段的发展轨迹，以深入了解职业特征与经济态度之间的相互作用。与贸易接触文献中最近强调接触外国需求与对国际竞争力的担忧之间关联的研究结果一致，我发现从事与出口依赖型部门相关职业的劳动力市场新进入者对社会支出形成了敌对偏好。利用数据的面板结构，我表明，虽然个人确实会根据预先存在的偏好自我选择职业——这证实了自我选择机制与职业 - 偏好联系相关——但他们也会因早期劳动力市场经历而调整这些偏好，这证实了社会化机制的重要性。
