Preview

Occupational Choice-Personality Matters

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
7693 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Occupational Choice-Personality Matters
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

IZA DP No. 4105

Occupational Choice: Personality Matters
Roger Ham P.N. (Raja) Junankar Robert Wells April 2009

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor

Occupational Choice: Personality Matters
Roger Ham
University of Western Sydney

P.N. (Raja) Junankar
University of Western Sydney and IZA

Robert Wells
University of Western Sydney

Discussion Paper No. 4105 April 2009

IZA P.O. Box 7240 53072 Bonn Germany Phone: +49-228-3894-0 Fax: +49-228-3894-180 E-mail: iza@iza.org

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

IZA Discussion Paper No. 4105 April 2009

ABSTRACT Occupational Choice: Personality Matters
In modern societies, people are often classified as “White Collar” or “Blue Collar” workers: that classification not only informs social scientists about the kind of work that they do, but

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    The short story “Blue-Collar Brilliance” by Mike Rose claims blue collar job use as much intellectual capacity as white collar job. Mike Rose wants audience to know how society perceive on blue collar worker, and fix the misconception about how blue collar jobs doesn’t use much of the brain.…

    • 238 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Rose studies the habits of blue-collar workers and argues that these types of jobs require the use of both “body and brain” (247). Therefore, complaining about studies conducted about blue-collar workers saying that scholars are missing the concept and instead of focusing on the amount of thought, they focus on the values the workers are showing (247). He is very adamant that intelligence can be acquire in these type of workplaces and not only by attending to school. To show that knowledge can be attainable in the blue-collar jobs he uses…

    • 249 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    White-collar jobs are on the rise in today’s world. They are not as dirty or as labor intensive as blue-collar jobs. It is not that white-collar jobs are not needed; it is just that blue-collar jobs make the world work like it should. The author wrote “The zombie apocalypse is a white-collar nightmare: a world with no need for the skills we have developed. Lawyers, journalists, investment bankers—they are liabilities, not leaders, in the zombie-infested world. (The exception to this rule, of course, is doctors.)” (Bosch). While white-collar workers claim to make a more decent living, their lack of skills is immense when compared to your local auto mechanic.…

    • 410 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    People are divided, if it is by age, races, gender, crude stereotypes, wealth, social status, or intelligence. Every person is put in a category that labels them. If she or he has a white-collar occupation within an office or something as such, she or he is labeled as hardworking, intuitive, and smart. Adults working in cafes, construction, or other blue-collar jobs are classified as thick, lazy, and unintelligent. In “Blue-Collar Brilliance” by Mike Rose, he retells how his mother and his uncle worked in a blue-collar job, or working class job, but does not just see them as mindless for their lack of formal education. His article was originally published in 2009 in the American Scholar. Rose addresses the misconceptions of what is intelligence using his personal stories as an example. Mike Rose’s “Blue-Collar Brilliance” conveys his opinions of working class Americas efficiently through emotional appeals, logical reasoning, and explaining his own definition of intelligence.…

    • 947 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    5 You will see a description of each assessment. Click on the TypeFocus link. Clicking this link will open up the TypeFocus website in a new window.…

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Individuals frequently expect that manual laborers are less educated, therefore making them less smart. Mike Rose was brought up in a group of blue-collars. Both of Rose's folks scarcely had educations, as they were early dropouts. Rose grew up watching his mom tend to tables, and learned at an early stage that blue-collar workers possessed an important set of abilities. In the article, “Blue-Collar Brilliance," author Mike Rose stresses his belief that blue-collar jobs must not be seen as illiterate jobs, but rather must be recognized for the amount of skills and intelligence these jobs truly require.…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Rosie and Uncle Joe, are both somewhat an image of the true core of blue-collar work. Mike says it himself “To acknowledge a broader range of intellectual capacity is to take seriously the concept of cognitive variability, to appreciate in all the Rosies and Joes…”(Pg254) If it wasn’t for the true brilliance shown in the many blue-collar professions or the ideas from that of a blue-collar professional, would we be where we are today? Because much of society would agree, that today is a cleaner, safer, much more efficient world than that of even 20 years ago, largely due to the contributions and actions of the blue-collar workforce. Lastly, if we continue to “reinforce social separations”(Pg254), do our actions make us more mentally competent than the thought we have of blue-collar professionals’? Or are we simply doing as Mike Rose said we would, and “reinforcing social separations”? That is the true question…

    • 672 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “Blue Collar Brilliance”, the author, Mike Rose, expressed multiple reasons why a blue-collar worker is intelligent and capable to participate in a Democratic society (Web). He challenged the bias of today’s world that lower-class jobs that do not require a degree mean the workers are not smart. He started out sharing the experiences of his mother and uncle who worked blue-collar jobs and showed various skills that took time and intelligence to develop. He continues his essay sharing his findings of other similar jobs he studied. He expressed different kind of skills from physical dexterity and tool-use competency to rhetorical skills and financial managing that these workers take time and effort to develop. I agree with him since my father,…

    • 1004 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Blue Collar Workers

    • 1112 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Currently in society, many individuals consider blue-collar workers unintelligent and uneducated. Blue-collar workers are seen in this perspective because of their hands on jobs in which many individuals assume that intelligence is not required. “Our cultural iconography promotes the muscled arm, sleeve rolled right against biceps, but no brightness behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain.” (Rose 98) In Mike Rose’s text, he explains how being a blue-collar worker does not mean an individual is unintelligent. Rose shows how knowledge can be gained from many years of personal and work experiences. Mike Rose grew up in a cultural background of blue-collar workers who did not get a chance to obtain a formal education. This makes Rose…

    • 1112 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    hihihihi

    • 405 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Changing nature and pattern of work: Deindustrialisation has led to blue collar workers being replaced by white collar office workers.…

    • 405 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    This week the assignment was to take the Focus 2 work interest assessment, which would provide possible job interests based on the resulting personality type characteristics. Mine resulted in a 71% artistic, 37.5% enterprising, and 25% social assessment. Artistic, which was my strongest result, is the category geared towards expressive and creative individuals. Enterprising, my second, is a marketing type with tendencies toward leadership abilities. And social is the category where a people person would typically be located. They also like to use a team to complete a task.…

    • 351 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Free pls

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages

    “The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society,” C. Wright Mills writes in “White Collar” (1951), his classic sociology text, as if he were describing a race of wan termites. Nikil Saval’s excellent new book, “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,” was inspired by Mills’s book, and it’s a fresh and intellectually omnivorous extension of its themes.…

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Cited: Anyon, Jean. “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” Exploring Language. Ed. Gary Goshgarian. New York: Pearson, 2009. 395-415. Print.…

    • 1009 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Immigrants In Germany

    • 605 Words
    • 3 Pages

    This dominance is allowed for the comparative advantage over the natives, and their ability to compete. This outcome, however, cannot be found in the German social-economical landscape because Germany pays high wages along with health insurance while in the United State has labor-intensive industries that use cheap labor of immigrants to maintain production at low cost, and keep competition in the market. Therefore, hiring low-skilled workers is more costly and inefficiently produced companies as a result end up replacing low- skilled labor in machine production. The shutdown caused a large number of manufacturing low professional jobs that were mainly for ‘guest workers’ from rural areas in Greece, Turkey, Italy, and Spain, which suffer from unemployment when the guest worker program was shut in 1973 (Drever, Hoffmesiter 2008). This job-scarce environment Germany had created in low paid jobs caused high unemployment rate among those immigrants. By 2005, the rate of unemployment was rating 20.5%. In general, after 1960, the second-generation immigrants’ policymakers and economics did not seek to address the problem nor setting plans and solutions, in the long run, for a successful integration in the German system. Nonetheless, the language difficulties, which the first generation faced the most, caused additional disadvantage or zero contribution to the integration since they received a poor education that influenced the second-generation ability to enter the formal, and high -skilled jobs in technology and…

    • 605 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Personality and perception are large factors in the workplace. Both should be understood by a manger to increase their awareness of how each impact the dynamics of the workplace. “Personality is defined as a relatively stable set of characteristics that influence an individual’s behavior” (OB, Pg.84), personality is a complex subject matter. In my experience, personality tests have been completed to help sum up these complex set of characteristics into a personality type. Individuals are then trained to “flex” to other personality types. Additionally, they are educated why a particular individual may react differently than others in the same situation. Making individuals aware of the personality differences has been helpful; however, personality is closely tied to perception, as well.…

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays