The Great separation: Top earner segregation at work in advanced capitalist economies

Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganiza...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Godechot, O. (Olivier)|||/items/f226a6a3-2888-490b-a94f-10ef82b77fdc, Tomaskovic-Devey, D. (Donald)|||/items/ff3762df-5ab6-4dec-88dc-121d1e55f0ac, Elvira, M.M. (Marta María)|||/items/d7ddae17-1301-43dc-8dd8-63936317c7fd
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Navarra
Repositorio:Dadun. Depósito Académico Digital de la Universidad de Navarra
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:dadun.unav.edu:10171/116568
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10171/116568
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Work
Earnings
Segregation
Inequality
Elite
Descripción
Sumario:Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the authors estimate the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in 12 countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. They find in almost all countries a growing workplace isolation of top earners and dramatically declining exposure of top earners to bottom earners. The authors perform a first exploration of the main factors accounting for this trend: deindustrialization, workplace downsizing, restructuring (including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, and subcontracting), and digitalization contribute substantially to the increase in top earner segregation. These findings open up a future research agenda on the causes and consequences of top earner segregation.