Culture, skills, job tasks and inequality

This chapter describes the overlap between the fields of sociology and economics in how they apply the concepts of culture, skills, job tasks and inequality to the study of employment and earnings. As described by human capital economists and cultural capital sociologists, cognitive and noncognitive skills are demanded by jobs and occupations and supplied by workers. The two fields agree that cognitive skills are measured by test scores and that noncognitive skills refer to psychologists’ “Big Five” personality characteristics – emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. When these, plus cognitive skill, are correlated with job performance, the highest correlation is with cognitive skill, with conscientiousness second. Economists have measured variation in these across time and national groups, and related these to variation in inequality and economic growth. They focus on the supply and demand for worker skills, while sociologists have emphasized labor market power relations as determinants.