Overview
What people regard as decent work is not fixed; it can shift with age, career stage, and the business environment. This paper, with Jaeeun Lee, Jeong-Ha Yim, and Juri Ahn, asks how Korean workers’ perceptions of decent work have changed since they entered the labor market, what patterns of change exist, and how the patterns differ across demographic groups.
We used public panel survey data from Korea (KLIPS). From the sixth wave (2003) the survey asks respondents which kind of job they consider decent work, with six options: a stable job, a socially recognized job, a job with high potential for development, a job that fits one’s aptitude, a high-income job, and a job with personal autonomy. Yearly answers of 681 employees across waves 6 to 19 were arranged as sequences, compared by optimal matching with the TraMineR package in R, and grouped by Ward hierarchical clustering.
Key points
- Seven clusters of change were identified, such as stability-oriented, social recognition, and development potential types.
- Stability was the dominant criterion for decent work in the Korean context.
- Cluster membership differed significantly by age and by education, but not by gender.
- Younger and university-educated employees were more often in clusters valuing aptitude and development potential.
- The discussion also reports differences in career success between clusters, which the authors treat as needing further examination.
Event
2019 Academy of Human Resource Development International Research Conference in the Americas, Louisville, Kentucky. The slides are dated 14 February 2019.
Citation
Lee, J., Ahn, J., Chae, C., & Yim, J. (2019, February). A sequence analysis of changing perceptions of decent work among Korean employees. Paper presented at the 2019 Academy of Human Resource Development International Research Conference in the Americas, Louisville, Kentucky.