The impact of social class on top managers’ attitudes towards employee downsizing

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the impact of top managers' social class on their attitude towards employee downsizing. Mobilizing Bourdieu's concepts of social class as a unique social position defined by the combination of economic, cultural, and social capital, we develop hypotheses about the effects of different capital endowments, which we test with unique data on more than 2500 top managers in Germany. We find that both higher economic and higher social capital increase openness towards employee dismissals, while higher cultural capital reduces it. We also find that the overall effect of a top manager's social position is an aggregate of the effects of the individual types of capital: Managers with high cultural, low social and low economic capital are least open to employee dismissals, while those with low cultural, high social and high economic capital are most open – with the other combinations lying somewhere between the two extremes.