Abstract:The paper draws on data from a national survey in Australia in 2014 to examine how social networks affect life satisfaction and happiness. Findings show that social network composition, social attachment, perceived social support, and the volume of social resources are significantly positively associated with life satisfaction and happiness. Stress about social commitments, feeling restricted by social demands, and being excluded by a social group are negatively associated with life satisfaction and happiness. These results indicate that social networks have both 'bright side' and 'dark side' effects on subjective wellbeing.Keywords: Australia, happiness, life satisfaction, social networks, subjective wellbeing IntroductionAcross the social sciences, social networks have been found to play an important role in educational attainment (Furstenberg and Hughes, 1995), parenting (Hagan et al., 1996), crime reduction (Hagan and McCarthy, 1995) and employment (Authors, 2009; Authors, 2011; Authors, 2015). In recent years, social scientists and policy makers have asserted that social networks also matter for health and wellbeing (Christakis and Fowler, 2009;Huxhold et al., 2013). However, despite the ubiquity of the social network concept scholars have highlighted a number of problems with theoretical and empirical work (Durlauf and Fafchamps, 2005;Lin, 2001;Lyons, 2011). In this paper we introduce a new model for the relationship of social networks to subjective wellbeing (SWB) and present data from a national Australian survey to explore the model. Subjective wellbeing refers to people's evaluations of their own lives, including life satisfaction (a cognitive evaluation) and happiness (an affective evaluation) (Diener, 2006; Authors, 2017). In psychology, research on SWB was triggered by Brickman and Campbell (1971) who argued that most individuals had an equilibrium (set-point) level of SWB which was only temporarily disturbed by significant life events. The idea of a set-point dominated SWB research for nearly thirty years (Headey, 2007) but began to be undermined by evidence that certain events such as marriage (Gottman, 1996) or repeated unemployment (Clark et al., 2004) were associated with long-term changes in individuals' SWB. This led some (Headey, 2007) to argue that the study of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 F o r R e v i e w O n l y 2 SWB should concentrate on the factors leading to enduring changes in SWB such as having life goals linked to personal and social networks (e.g. family, friends, social participation). However, network research on subjective outcomes has remained comparatively uncommon (Hauberer, 2011; Authors, 2016a) and early influential social network research on SWB (Christakis and Fowler, 2009;Wilkinson, 2002;Helliwell, 2006) has also been convincingly criticised (Lyons, 2...
This article addresses a long-standing controversy about whether or not the influence of guanxi on occupational attainment has been on the decline during China’s market reforms. The authors argue that guanxi continuously plays an influential role in facilitating occupational attainment when China’s labor markets face a great deal of institutional uncertainty. A large-scale survey of job seekers shows that the number of Chinese job seekers who used guanxi contacts to secure employment increased from 40 percent in 1978 to 80 percent in 1999. Job seekers’ ties to guanxi contacts were predominantly strong rather than weak, and these ties were used to obtain both job information and the influence of guanxi favoritism. As compared to information gainers, influence gainers were significantly more satisfied with job outcomes, more satisfied with work relations, and better able to obtain soft-skill jobs when market reforms were deepening in the 1992–1999 period.
This article examines whether guanxi networks are still influential in China's emerging labour market in light of economic liberalization. In-depth interviews with 65 Chinese job searchers show that guanxi networks influence job search and acquisition in a considerably transformed state sector, when jobs are highly desirable or when jobs are 'soft-skill' and thus job performance is hard to measure, quantify or monitor.The influence of guanxi networks is, however, limited, resisted or eliminated when large corporations, mostly in the non-state sector, adopt transparent and standardized procedures to screen and recruit the most qualified candidates. Guanxi ties and professional ties are also interconnected in employment processes and professional ties are potentially transformable into guanxi ties.These results are discussed from institutional and cultural perspectives to contribute to a social network approach to labour market research in Chinese and non-Chinese societies. KEY WORDSguanxi networks / job searches / labour market / urban China
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