This article presents new findings on the perception of social justice in a country comparison of Austria with its three post-socialist neighboring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The analysis considers both, changes in the structure and perception of inequality. The first part of this article deals with the historical roots of the countries during the Habsburg monarchy and continues with the different developments after World War I and II up to the present. In the second part, socio-economic trends from 1960 to 2020, and the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys 1987 to 2019 are investigated. The findings show that most of the population in all four countries thinks that income differences are too large, while judgments are also subject to dynamic change. In addition, there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves higher than people in the other three countries and see their society as dominated by the middle classes. The opposite is true in Hungary, where most people think that they live in a society characterized by small elite, while the mass of the people belong to the bottom.

This paper aims to comprehensively examine the effects of societal and individual characteristics on work-related attitudes, specifically work commitment and work orientations, using a single dataset and comparable models. It also seeks to relate these attitudes to classic theories and understand how societal factors shape work-related attitudes. The analysis is based on data collected by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in its work orientations survey. Data is analyzed using factor analyses, correspondence analyses, and multilevel regressions. The paper provides an overview of work-related attitudes at the country level and a detailed analysis of societal and individual variables that shape these attitudes. The results indicate that individual attitudes reflect large societal trends and developments, which are discussed with reference to current studies and classic theories. This paper contributes to understanding work-related attitudes by offering a comprehensive analysis of the effects of societal and individual characteristics, using a single dataset and comparable models. It also relates these attitudes to classic theories and discusses how societal factors shape work-related attitudes. The findings also have policy implications, particularly in the recruitment and retention of highly qualified and motivated workers in different countries.