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Are Scandinavians lazy or hard‐working?
Author(s) -
Sipilä J.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of social welfare
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.664
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1468-2397
pISSN - 0907-2055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2397.1996.tb00134.x
Subject(s) - norwegian , work (physics) , argumentation theory , welfare , working population , population , wage , sociology , political science , demographic economics , law , economics , demography , mechanical engineering , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , engineering
The popular image of work and working in Scandinavia is highly contradictory. One discourse stresses the strict work ethic of Scandinavian people and the participation of the whole population in wage labor. Another discourse says that welfare states have undermined the motivation of people in Scandinavian to work. This article explores the argumentation of both discourses and compares the industry of people in Finland, Norway and Sweden with the situation in other OECD countries. The picture that unfolds is contradictory: Scandinavia has a high labor market participation rate, but Norwegian people nonetheless work only comparatively few hours, Finnish people work long hours, while Swedish people fall somewhere in‐between. Overall, the people of Scandinavia are certainly not the most hard‐working in the world, but the amount of work does not seem to correlate directly with the national standard of living.