ABSTRACT

Zoltán Szántó-János I. Tóth
Unemployment in Fejér County.
Some Lessons from an Empirical Labour Market Research

In this paper we give an account of the results of an empirical research on the Fejér County labor market conducted in the first two months of 2001. The purpose of this research was to discover the facts, why this dynamic region of the country struggled with scarcity of labor force and unemployment at the same time. Especially foreign-owned companies wanted to hire foreign employees, when more than 12,000 unemployed workers were registered and the unemployment rate was 6.4 per cent in 2000. Notwithstanding this relatively high number, the composition of the unemployed did not allow for a real substitution of the existing labor force, having a positive effect on their wage as well. At a time when multinational corporations continuously had job announcements, only a small fraction of these 12,215 unemployed workers could be hired.

The result of this field study supported our view - based on the initial findings in the regional unemployment statistics - that in Fejér County, even though it was among the most dynamic and most developed regions of Hungary, there were substantial differences in the composition of the unemployed as well as in their chances to get a job. Due to many factors - though not with the same weight in all districts of the county labor market - only a fraction of the registered unemployed could find a job within a short period of time. On the one hand, low qualification, age, health and family problems of the potential workers were among these factors. On the other hand, overall lack of public transport contacts - due to the underdeveloped transport system of the county - had also a significant impact on unemployment, looking at the relatively long distance between the potential work place and the home of the unemployed.


Lajos Bódis
Multinational Mass Producers and the Public Placement Service

Multinational parts manufacturers and assembly plants are important actors in the Hungarian labour market. An increasing number of them are unable to find enough semi-skilled workers, although a significant proportion of unemployment benefit recipients is composed of the low-qualified, long-term unemployed. The study explores the reasons why matching the unemployed and employers is so difficult, and discusses the role of public placement service in mediation between them. In terms of the principal-agent theory the study analyses the consequences of the situation in which the public employment service acts in two different capacities: it offers services to companies and the unemployed, but it also acts as an authority over them. The study argues that the efficiency of the public placement service can be increased by refining mediation procedures, rather than by breaking up its current organisation, according to the two functions. Finally, two novel labour market programmes will be discussed. It will be shown that they may improve matching the unemployed and employers, and reduce the risk of their opportunist behaviour.


Béla Janky
Employee Ownership in an Emerging Market Economy:
Theoretical Considerations and the Empirical Evidence of the Hungarian Corporate Panel Survey

The study investigates the role of employee ownership in the emerging market economy of Hungary in the 1990s. We first briefly summarise the core of the various approaches to the problem of workers' participation in economic organisations. We focus our attention on the specific circumstances under which different forms of corporations owned by employees are more likely to survive in an "ideal typical" market economy. After a short theoretical survey we turn to the empirical evidence provided by the Hungarian Corporate Panel Survey, and try to test the theoretical hypotheses about the major determinants of the emergence of employee ownership in organisations. The data from the early and late 1990s show that basic characteristics of Hungarian industrial companies with employee ownership more or less follow the expected patterns. Nevertheless, the adopted explanatory variables can explain only a small part of the variance of form of ownership. Moreover, the large number of organisations with employee ownership in our samples remain unexplained.


Ferenc Moksony
Conceptualization and Scientific Discovery.
On Paul Lazarsfeld's Methodological Philosophy

Scientific discovery is often identified with the sheer observation of a new phenomenon. Thomas Kuhn has convincingly shown this idea to be false, stressing the vital role that theory and conceptualization play in this process. The history of contextual analysis nicely illustrates the validity of Kuhn's argument: although its earliest applications date back to the 19th century, it was not until Paul Lazarsfeld discussed its basic logic in the 1950s that the potentialities of this method have been fully noticed. What Lazarsfeld added to isolated uses of this technique was a conceptual framework that greatly facilitated the diffusion of contextual analysis within the sociological community. This example shows that for a new method to get firmly established, mere application is not enough - serious conceptual work is needed as well. It also demonstrates one central element in Lazarsfeld's general methodological philosophy - namely, the strong commitment to the explication of the logical foundations of the procedures employed in empirical social research.