Abstract

The projects aims at contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of social inequalities created in the work sphere by referring to a comprehensive understanding of employment relationships. It allows for integrating interdisciplinary evidence on the role of a variety of material and non-material resources and demands, gratifications and contributions, and psychological contracts, and includes the pivotal distinction in class theory between work contracts and service relationships linked to different levels of job autonomy and security. Thus, the inherently multi-dimensional character of social inequalities can be taken into account as well as the perspective that inequalities do not only result from unequal gratifications but also from unequal contributions to be performed in order to obtain these gratifications. Moreover, as the project title makes evident, employment conditions influence life chances in other life domains for better or worse. Vice versa, preferences regarding private life influence what employment conditions are seen as more or less favorable and desirable. This perspective on interdependencies between capabilities in work and private life includes classical and at present re-emphasized material inequality dimensions like income and job security as well as non-material dimensions of inequality in a way that moves beyond a purely additive perspective by investigating possible trade-offs, conflicts, or compensatory relations between them.