Are they Really Just Lazy? Competing Accounts of Public Sector Employment

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 23. Research on Work

Abstract

In recent years, the stereotype that public workers are lazy, unproductive and inclined to avoid competition has returned to the forefront of political discourse. Though this account may be the most politically prominent, it is overly reductionist and reliant on stereotypes. Academic scholarship suggests two other accounts of why individuals choose to work in the public sector: public service motivation and refuge. Using the 2006 General Social Survey, I test these three competing accounts and find that the popular account of lazy noncompetition is unsupported in these data. The results show that public service motivation (PSM) only predicts public sector work for white men, suggesting that engaging individual values in occupational decision-making is a luxury for more privileged groups. The results also suggest that for less privileged groups the public sector is a refuge from discrimination.

Author

• Lauren Benditt, Stanford University