Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Migration
• 2.1 Functionalist-Structuralist Paradigms of Social theory
• 2.2 the Functionalist theory
• 2.3 the Structuralist theory
• 2.4 the Continuation of migration
Structural inflation
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• Wages in advanced industrial societies not only reflect conditions of SS
and DD; they also confer status & prestige, social qualities that inhere to
the jobs.
• People believe that wages should reflect status and have rigid notions about the
correlation between occupation status and pay.
• Wage offered by employers are not entirely free to respond to changes in the SS of
workers.
• A variety of informal social expectations and formal institutional mechanisms
ensures that wages correspond to the hierarchies of prestige and status that the
people perceive and expect.
• Employers cannot simply raise wages to attract workers for unskilled jobs. This
would upset socially defined relationships between status and remuneration.
• The cost of employers of raising wages to attract low-level workers is typically
more than the cost of these workers’ wage alone; • wage should increase along the job
hierarchy, a problem known as structural inflation.
• Provide strong incentive to employers to seek easier and cheaper solutions, such as
importation of migrant workers who will accept low wages.
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Motivation Problems
• Occupational hierarchies are also critical for the motivation of workers, as
people also work for the accumulation and maintenance of social status.
• Acute motivational problems arise at the bottom of the hierarchy as there is status to be
maintained and few venues for upward mobility.
• The problem is inescapable and structural because the bottom cannot be eliminated
from the labor market.
• Mechanization to eliminate the lowest and least desirable class of jobs will simply
create a new bottom tier composed of jobs that used to be just above the bottom rung.
• Then employers need are workerswho view bottom-level jobs simply as a means of
earning money, and for whom employment is reduced solely to income.
• For many reason immigrants satisfy this need, at least at the beginning of their career.
• Most migrants begin as target earners, seeking to earn for specific goal that will improve their social well-
being at home – building a house, paying for school, buying land, acquiring consumer goods.