The second session of the EUI Social Investment Working Group features presentations by Giuliano Bonoli and Annatina Aerne.
Speaker: Giuliano Bonoli (Professor at Université de Lausanne, UNIL)
Discussant: Luís Russo (PhD researcher, EUI)
Deservingness perceptions in the social investment welfare state
Abstract:
The study of deservingness perceptions is a vibrant filed of welfare state research, which has recently acquired additional relevance in the context to the ongoing shift towards multicultural societies in Europe. Deservingness research, in fact, has found consistently that migrant status, plays a key role as a determinant of who is considered to be deserving of collective help. This strand of research has focused mostly on deservingness perceptions to cash benefits. However, as welfare states are being reoriented towards social investment, it becomes important to know if this effect will apply also to typical social investment policies such as ALMPs and childcare. We hypothesise that given the fact that social investment interventions require an active involvement by the recipient and promote integration, migration status will be less detrimental to perceived deservingness.
We explore this question on the basis of new dedicated original vignette survey carried out in Autumn 2021 with near-representative samples of 1,500+ respondents in six countries (DK, S, D, CH, UK, US). We find that, contrary to expectation, deservingness perceptions to key social investment policies are very similar to those observed in relation to cash benefits, and that the immigrant penalty remains strong.
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Speaker: Annatina Aerne (Postdoctoral researcher at UNIL; Visiting Fellow at EUI)
Discussant: Luca Cigna (PhD researcher, EUI)
Equivalent? Not quite. Employer perceptions of the value of alternative skill certification in the childcare sector in Switzerland
Abstract:
In advanced knowledge economies, access to (good quality) employment depends crucially on certified skills. Individuals who obtained their qualifications abroad or have acquired the relevant skills in an informal setting, face a risk of labour market marginalisation. To deal with this problem, several countries have introduced alternative skill certifications, obtained either through the recognition of prior learning (RPL) or the recognition of foreign degrees. Relying on either signalling or human capital explanations of the value of educational certificates, we study employers’ perception of these alternative credentials. First, with a large-N quantitative study we assess whether RPL and RFD are considered by employers to be of equal value to standard ones. Second, based on qualitative interviews, we focus on the employers’ motivation behind their attribution of a specific value to these alternative degrees. We find that alternative certificates are highly valued —albeit not equally—as standard ones. The reason for their lower value is related to a different kind of human capital that is certified with these credentials and not so much because of a weaker signalling value.