Doeringer, Piore, and the dual labour market theory
Hello and welcome to the tenth episode of Theory of the Week, a weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
This and next week I want to talk about structural factors that keep people in poverty. Not poverty in the sense of not trying hard enough, but poverty in the sense of circumstances that make it nearly impossible to think beyond tomorrow, regardless of effort or ability. People who may well be working, but in conditions where structural factors beyond their control prevent them from ever finding a way out.
I want to dedicate two episodes to this topic because poverty traps exist in both developed and developing countries, even though we are of course talking about very different levels and forms of poverty.
For developed countries, we might expect reasonably efficient labour market outcomes. After all, these are highly developed economies with formal education systems, labour market regulations, and extensive welfare states. If we control for differences in human capital, meaning education, acquired skills, and general ability, we might expect outcomes to be largely unbiased.
But then consider these questions. How can it be that people with precarious jobs tend to stay in precarious jobs? How can it be that two people with a similar educational background end up in very different wealth positions? And how can it be that someone’s likelihood of ever reaching stable employment depends so heavily on their starting point? Differences in individual behaviour and ability are one answer. But are those differences really independent of the conditions people grow up and work in?
One theory that tries to answer these questions is the dual labour market theory, developed by Doeringer and Piore in 1971. It argues that there are in fact two distinct levels of the labour market: a primary and a secondary one.
The primary sector is characterised by stable employment, good opportunities to advance, and relatively high pay with amenities like paid leave. The secondary sector, by contrast, is characterised by unstable employment and low pay. Neither employer nor worker invests much in the relationship because the employment is simply not designed to last. The jobs are precarious, offer little opportunity to progress, and are often short-term by design.
People in the secondary sector are, in a meaningful sense, stuck. It is very hard to move from secondary to primary employment, and the precarious conditions of secondary work make it difficult to accumulate the things that primary employers look for. As we will see, it is far from random who ends up in which sector in the first place.
References
Doeringer, P. B., & Piore, M. J. (1971). Internal labor markets and manpower analysis. D. C. Heath and Company.
Xibao, G., Ping, L. (2025). Dual Labor Market. In: Yinxing, H. (eds) Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-4036-9_222
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