ABSTRACT Like many European countries, the Netherlands locked down in March 2020 to combat the spread of COVID-19. Although government officials called for solidarity, the lockdown measures made it more difficult to help fellow citizens. In this study, we examine whether informal helping declined during the first lockdown in the Netherlands and to what extent changes depended on people's resources (time/health), motivation (solidarity/COVID concerns) and opportunities (social contact). In general, we expected an overall decline of informal helping, and this decline was expected to be smaller for people with more resources, motivation, and opportunities. We used data from the SOCON COVID-19 Panel survey that were collected through internet and telephone interviews before (February 2019/2020) and shortly after the first lockdown in the Netherlands (July 2020) ( N = 522). We examine the impact of resources, motivation and opportunities for informal help provided to relatives, friends and neighbors separately. Indeed, results showed that people overall helped less during the lockdown than before. The decline in helping relatives was smaller among those who lost work, were worried about relatives, experienced solidarity with others or had more contact with relatives during the lockdown. People who contacted more with neighbors during the lockdown period provided more informal help to them during the lockdown than before.

ABSTRACT Informal caregiving, meaning taking health-related care of an older and/or disabled person in the personal network, often has consequences for paid work. Classically, scholars focus on two strategies of informal caregivers to adapt employment: stopping to work and reducing working hours. Two other plausible, but neglected, strategies may similarly have career consequences, namely changing jobs and becoming self-employed. First, we empirically assess whether experiencing a work-care conflict is a condition for choosing a work adaption strategy. Second, we theoretically and empirically take a life course (age at start of caregiving episode) and gender perspective on strategies to adapt paid work. We use detailed retrospective data on informal caregiving in the Netherlands (N = 3,673 caregiving episodes of 2,112 caregivers). Applying multilevel logistic regression analysis, we find that caregivers who felt that they had difficulties combining work and care, were more likely to choose any strategy. Especially caregivers who started to provide care at a young age (24 years or younger) were likely to reduce working hours or change jobs. When starting care in the early family formation stage (25–34 years), women were more likely to reduce working hours, whereas men were more likely to stop working in early middle age (45–54 years).

ABSTRACT This paper presents unique descriptive and explanatory analyses of cross-national variation in work ethic in 44 European countries (European Values Study 2008). A strong work ethic is the conviction that people have a moral duty to work. To explain differences in the adherence of the work ethic between countries two alternative theories are tested: modernisation theory and social institutional theory. Modernisation theory hypothesises that richer, more highly educated and urbanised countries have a weaker work ethic. Alternatively, social institutional theory predicts that countries' religious heritage, generosity of the welfare state and political history can explain differences in work ethic between countries. Multilevel regression models on an unprecedented set of 44 countries show that the modernisation hypotheses are supported. With regard to institutions, it is shown that work ethic is stronger in countries with an Islamic and Orthodox heritage as compared to a Protestant and Catholic heritage and in ex-communist countries and countries with less generous welfare states. When both theories are tested simultaneously, variance decomposition suggests that social institutional theory has more explanatory power than modernisation theory. Religious heritage is shown to be the most important factor to explain variation in work ethic between countries. Thus, although our modern societies become increasingly secularised, religious heritage still impacts our norms and values about work in a significant manner.

ABSTRACT In this article we answered the research question to what extent variation in extrinsic and intrinsic job preference orientations can be attributed to and explained by differences between individuals and between countries. We argued that socialization in school, economic deprivation, and job quality influence job preferences, and formulated testable hypotheses on the individual and country level. After first testing for cross-national equivalence of the latent constructs and assuring that factor solutions were satisfactory, we employed multiple response multilevel models on a subset of 22 countries in the European Values Study 1999/2000. The findings indicate that higher educational attainment, a high income, working in managerial and higher professional jobs, and having autonomy in one's job stimulate intrinsic job preference orientations, while particularly educational attainment and autonomy temper extrinsic work values. Workers in semi- and unskilled manual jobs have the highest extrinsic job preferences. On top of individual characteristics, living in a nation that invests much in human capital or has a high quality labour market is associated with lower levels of extrinsic job preferences. Moreover, countries with socio-economic features that reduce the risk of economic deprivation have a more intrinsically motivated workforce.