The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examine variation in workplace wage inequalities between native Swedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors’ findings are that immigrant-native wage gaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based claims on organizational resources, the central causal mechanism identified by relational inequality theory, to be stronger. The authors conclude that workplace variation in the non-Western immigrant-native wage gaps is contingent on organizational variation in the relative power of groups and the institutional context in which that power is exercised.

This is a three paper dissertation examining between-workplace and between-industry income inequality and their relations with changing labor market institutions and economic structures since roughly the early the 1990s. All three papers use large scale administrative linked employer-employee panel data (LEEP) for multiple years (roughly, 1993-2013) for a set of countries that span North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In the first chapter, I examine country differences in levels of between-workplace income inequality. Countries strongly vary in levels of between-workplace inequality. On the high end for example, over 60% of Germany’s income inequality occurs between workplaces. On the lower end, less than 30% of the Netherland’s income inequality occurs between workplaces. I use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify institutional configurations that lead to high levels of between-workplace inequality. Ultimately, I find three distinct configurations, and that all three configurations are mainly composed of items related to labor union dynamics such as between-union conflicts, collective bargaining coverage, or union membership concentration. The second paper looks at trends in between-workplace inequality rather than levels. Recent evidence has shown that rising between-workplace inequality has become the dominant driver of rising income inequality, but less is known about the specific processes that have facilitated rising between-workplace inequality. I examine how labor union dynamics (e.g. declining union density), employment institutions (e.g. legal regulations around permanent and temporary work contracts), and economic structure (e.g. rising rates of globalization and the decline of the manufacturing sector) have impacted trends in between-workplace inequality. I find that many of these items significantly impact both between-workplace and within-workplace inequality, but that their effects tend to be stronger on between-workplace inequality. Finally, the last paper examines industry-level trends in low-wage work since the early 1990s for a set of European countries. Low-wage work has become increasingly important to study as income inequality has risen across much of Europe. Many European nations have likewise undergone significant shifts in their labor market institutions. Using earnings data from administrative sources, industry-level trends in the concentration of low-wage work since the mid-1990s are examined for six European countries (Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Czechia, and Slovenia). Previous studies found that low-wage jobs were less common in core industries such as manufacturing and plentiful in service sector industries such as retail. These early findings are broadly confirmed here, but significant industry-level variation in levels and trends in low-wage work are found across these countries. Industry-level trends in low-wage work are related to industry-specific industrial relations.

Organizational research has revealed considerable variation in immigrant–native pay inequalities across workplace contexts. However, less is known about how broader labor market institutions intersect in the local dynamics of wage setting between employees of immigrant and native backgrounds. We argue that union density and higher shares of employees in licensed occupations in workplaces constrain organizational opportunity structures for unequal pay according to immigrant backgrounds. Our analysis of longitudinal linked employer–employee administrative data for the Norwegian labor market shows that the wage gap between immigrants and natives decreases with increasing workplace unionization, but almost exclusively for immigrants who are union members. Next, licensure raises pay at the individual and workplace levels, although any reduction in immigrant–native pay gaps is contingent on immigrants’ access to licensed jobs. Our findings support the claim that institutional regulation in the workplace reduces the organizational scope of unequal pay based on immigrant status.

Germany has experienced sharply rising earnings inequalities, both between and within workplaces. Working from prior literature on rising employment dualization and the fissuring of workplaces into high and low wage employers, we explore a set of organizational explanations for rising between and within workplace inequality focusing on the role of employment dualization, skill segregation/complexity, and firm fissuring. We describe and model these hypothesized processes with administrative data on a large random sample panel of German workplaces. We find that rising inequalities are associated with polarization in industrial wage rates and the birth of new low wage workplaces, as well as increased establishment skill specialization and the growth of part-time jobs in workplace divisions of labor. We conclude with recommendations for future research that directly examines more proximate mechanisms and their relative importance in different institutional contexts.

‍

Social networks shape both international migration flows and residential settlement decisions, yet few studies address the links between job-related residential networks and employment outcomes among immigrants and their children. Using Norwegian linked employer–employee administrative data with information on detailed neighborhood locations, we study how connections between neighbors are tied to workplace sorting and wages among workers of immigrant and native background. To assess the presence of residential networks, we compare workers’ observed exposure to neighbors at work against a simulated baseline of random workplace allocation within municipalities. Our findings show that immigrants are considerably more likely to show an excess workplace exposure to immigrant neighbors, particularly coethnics from the same country of origin, compared to natives living in the same neighborhood. However, working alongside immigrant neighbors is only modestly associated with lower wages among immigrants, suggesting that these networks facilitate employment but offer limited economic benefits. In contrast, children of immigrants exhibit a weaker reliance on neighborhood-based immigrant networks and show no significant wage disadvantage when working with immigrant-background neighbors. These findings highlight how residential networks concentrate immigrants in specific workplaces, while less reliance on local networks in the second generation suggests greater integration into the mainstream economy.

Terrorist events reinforce stereotypes towards minority groups. However, empirical evidence on their labor market effects is mixed and inconclusive. Aiming to harmonize previous findings, we offer a new relational account to understanding event-based changes in ethnoracial disparities and argue that events (1) need to be understood as being embedded in a broader temporal context, which defines to what degree they evoke stereotypes about outgroup members, and (2) that stereotypes can lead to different degrees of discrimination, depending on inequality regimes of workplaces. We use Islamist terrorist events in the West and changes in the workforce composition within German workplaces as an example to test our theoretical presumptions. Applying a big-data approach, combining large linked employer-employee data (1999-2019) with archival newspaper data and the Global terrorism database, we show that periods of multiple Islamist terrorist events and high salience of the topic of Islamist terrorism decrease the employment of male employees with Middle Eastern origin, signaled through their names, within workplaces. The effects are mainly driven by smaller workplaces that do not implement organizational features restricting discriminatory behavior, such as formalized hiring processes or shop-floor worker representation.

Occupations have long been held by sociologists, from the older status attainment tradition to the more recent micro-class tradition, to be at the center of stratification writ large. Occupations are specifically argued to be central to shaping wages. Indeed, this has been understood as the comparative advantage of sociology relative to economics in understanding wage setting. However, an undercurrent has for decades existed in sociology that suggests other contexts, mainly workplaces and jobs, may be as important if not more important stratification contexts. Until recently data with the capacity to simultaneously assess all three contexts has been virtually non-existent. In this paper we use administrative data from five countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) to assess the relative contributions of occupations, establishments, and jobs to wages. Our core finding is that there is no universal link between occupations and wages, with occupations explaining between 30 and 56 % of wage variance across country-years. As well, in all countries except Finland establishments explain more of the variance in wages than do occupations. Jobs and establishment figure prominently in the social organization of wages, and must be included in theoretical models and whenever possible in empirical analyses of social stratification.