JOB CHANGES IN THE FEDERAL-REPUBLIC-OF-GERMANY AND POLAND - A LONGITUDINAL ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF WELFARE-CAPITALIST AND STATE-SOCIALIST LABOR-MARKET SEGMENTATION

Focusing on career mobility conceived as a sequence of job-shifts with in and between firms, in this paper we compare Germany and Poland with regard to job-shift patterns found among men and women in these count ries. The paper aims at testing a series of hypotheses on the comparat ive impact of labour-market segmentation (industrial sector, firm size , and social class) in welfare-capitalist and state-socialist systems. The hypotheses are tested against retrospective longitudinal data on job histories of the 1939-41 birth-cohorts from the 1981-2 German Life History Study and the 1972 Polish Life History Study. We find pattern ed differences between the two countries in regard to the effect of in dividual characteristics on career mobility, in regard to the impact o f labour-market segmentation, and in regard to the effect of gender. T o our knowledge, this is the first comparative investigation of this k ind. Some implications of our findings for tracing the impact of curre nt East European market reforms are also discussed.