Temporary Jobs and Social Stratification in East Asia: Education, Occupation, and Intergenerational Mobility

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationships between social stratification and temporary jobs in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. Drawing on Goldthorpe’s (2000) class theory, we predict the associations between education, occupation, and job temporality would be uniform across the four societies, but that gender difference in job temporality would be diverse. Using the EASS 2006-2012 datasets, we test these hypotheses. Although some predictions are falsified, most of them are confirmed. The gender difference in the temporary job rate is largest in Japan, second largest in Korea, and no difference is observed between in Taiwan and China. Low social class and educational level raise the temporary job rate, and the effects of class origin measured by the father’s educational level is mediated by the children’s educational level. These findings are uniform across in Japan Korea, Taiwan and China.