Spirals of Success and Failure? the Interplay of Control Beliefs and Working Lives in the Transition from Planned to Market Economy
Spirals of Success and Failure? the Interplay of Control Beliefs and Working Lives in the Transition from Planned to Market Economy
This chapter examines whether the situation after 1989 opened up new avenues for creating and mobilizing effort and self-initiative. It introduces the concept of control beliefs in the contexts of working lives and abrupt system change, and investigates, on the basis of three waves of longitudinal data, whether personality dispositions such as control and efficacy beliefs differentiated actors in their coping with new and adverse conditions, and whether massive changes in social context and one's individual life inversely changed personality dispositions. The results show that the most frequent working-life transitions were not driven through perceived control during the whole period under observation from the very beginning of the transformation until 1996. However, to achieve the comparatively infrequent upward moves, East Germans could profit from internal control beliefs.
Keywords: self-initiative, East Germany, control beliefs, personality dispositions
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