Willful Versus Woeful Underemployment: Perceived Volition and Social Class Background Among Overqualified College Graduates
通过深度访谈，挑战了不充分就业研究中关于工人大多是非自愿的假设，发现大学毕业生对过度合格的感知存在差异，且这些感知与社会阶层背景相关，影响工作满意度和心理困扰。
This article challenges a key assumption of underemployment scholarship: that the modal underemployed worker is involuntarily underemployed. Drawing from in-depth interviews, the author analyzes one particular type of underemployment: overqualification among college graduates. Findings demonstrate (a) that workers differ markedly in their perceptions of overqualification, (b) that these perceptions create distinct overqualification experiences, and (c) that these experiences vary by social class background. While some respondents report being overqualified at no choice of their own and are struggling to find better work, many others narrate their overqualification experience as voluntary. Among these graduates, who are likely to come from middle-class backgrounds, some understand overqualification as a temporary period of exploration; others think of it as potentially permanent and see themselves as opting out of the typical postcollege career path. Importantly, typical factors that have been analyzed as consequences of overqualification (job dissatisfaction and distress) covary with perceptions, such that the most negative outcomes tend to be among the disproportionately working-class graduates who view themselves as involuntarily underemployed.