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European Sociological Review Advance Access originally published online on July 22, 2005
European Sociological Review 2005 21(4):393-408; doi:10.1093/esr/jci027
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Job Mobility in the Former East and West Germany: The Effects of State-Socialism and Labor Market Composition

Wilfred Uunk

Wilfied Uunk, Department of Social Cultural Sciences, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, Netherlands. E-mail: w.uunk{at}uvt.nl

Bogdan W. Mach

Bogdan W. Mach, Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Polna 18/20, 00–625 Warsaw, Poland.

Karl Ulrich Mayer

Karl Ulrich Mayer, Department of Sociology, Yale University, Center for Research on Inequalities and Life Course – CIQLE, 140 Prospect Street, PO Box 208265, New Haven, CT, USA.

In this article we study job shift patterns in the former East and West Germany. We compare rates of (within-firm and across-firm) job mobility of East and West German men and study the impact of labor market composition (education, social class, industrial sector, and firm size) on the mobility rates. Our hypotheses are derived from an institutional approach in which we describe similarities and differences in institutions and structures of the two former German labor markets. Analyses of retrospective job history data from German Life History Studies revealed a basic similarity in the odds of job shifting of East and West German male workers. Yet, East German men differed from West German men in having higher odds of job mobility within a firm and lower odds of job mobility to other firms. Explanatory analyses show that firm size accounts best for the country difference in the rate of within-firm job mobility: 40 per cent of the higher within-firm mobility rate can be accounted for by the greater size of firms in East Germany. These findings suggest that state-socialism affected work life mobility and that it did so in part through differential labor market composition.

Manuscript received: February 2003.


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