Social Capital and Finding a Job: Do Contacts Matter?

Mouw, Ted

doi:10.2307/1519749

Cited by 554 publications

(494 citation statements)

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“…Following Granovetter's original research (1974), the first generation of job-search studies asked the respondent about the tie she used to find a job (for reviews, see Lin 1999;Marsden and Gorman 2001;Mouw 2003). Then, the researcher examined the relationship between the tie actually used to find a job and labor-market outcomes such as income, socio-economic status, and job satisfaction.…”

Section: Within-individual Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Intuitively, we expect a well-connected job seeker to be more selective than a poorly connected job seeker because she expects to benefit from her high-quality contacts (for reviews, see Lin 1999;Marsden and Gorman 2001;Mouw 2003). As a result, a better-connected job seeker should have better labor-market outcomes.…”

Section: Within-individual Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, a better-connected job seeker should have better labor-market outcomes. However, social-network studies suffer from an omitted-variable problem (Mouw 2003(Mouw , 2006; for a more general statement of this problem, see Manski 1995). Specifically, an observed or unobserved characteristic of the job seeker, such as her education or temperament, might create a spurious correlation between her social capital and her labor-market outcomes.…”

Section: Within-individual Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the strength-of-strong-ties argument implies that, because strong ties are motivated to help the job seeker, job seekers should benefit from searching through strong ties (e.g., Granovetter 1983: 209-213). However, we might also expect that contacts who are in the same occupation, industry, or geographic area, or those who are homophilous with the job seeker on work-relevant attributes, should lead to better job-market outcomes than formal methods (Granovetter 1974;Mouw 2003;Cingano and Rosolia 2008;Horvath 2011;McDonald 2011). While the literature implies that the distinction between a contact's motivation and his relevance is important, we lack a systematic model of how these characteristics of contacts relate to job-search outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To avoid the problem of selection on the dependent variable, the second generation of studies focused on the relationship between a job seeker's social networks and her labor-market outcomes. However, as Mouw (2003;see also Mouw 2006) argues, homophily in social networks might render the association between social networks and labor-market outcomes spurious, which limits the potential contribution of these studies to the ties-strength debate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Motivation vs. relevance: Using strong ties to find a job in Urban China

Obukhova¹

2012

Social Science Research

106

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While the idea that contacts matter in finding a job is intuitively appealing, we still do not know-after decades of research-how and why strong ties benefit job seekers. To resolve this confusion, we need to theorize how specific characteristics of ties are related to the mechanisms that make job search through contacts effective. We have reasons to expect that, while a contact's motivation influences the likelihood that a job seeker receives an offer, her homophily with the job seeker on occupation and other job-relevant attributes influences the quality of the offer. The use of strong ties among university students to find jobs in China provides a unique opportunity to empirically isolate the relationship between contact characteristics and the mechanisms through which contacts benefit the job seeker. I tested my hypotheses with data on both the successful and unsuccessful job searches of 478 graduates of China's flagship universities, who, as first-time job seekers, primarily used strong ties. Survey results are consistent with my hypotheses: Job seekers who used strong ties to look for jobs had more offers-but not better offers-than those who used only formal methods.

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Section: Within-individual Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Within-individual Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Within-individual Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Motivation vs. relevance: Using strong ties to find a job in Urban China

Obukhova¹

2012

Social Science Research

106

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Social Networks and Racial and Ethnic Boundaries in Organizations

Rizova

Stone

2015

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism

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In the era of globalization, researchers and practitioners alike advocate racial and ethnic diversity in organizations as a way of increasing equality, creativity, and productivity as well as in order to enhance the quality of decision making. Nevertheless, organizations, both domestic and global, remain less diverse than anticipated, especially in the context of a mobile global world. This entry employs the analytical concepts of group boundaries and social closure to better understand racial and ethnic diversity in organizations. In particular, we examine the role social networks play in maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries and how they act as a potent mechanism by which power and status dynamics are continuously reproduced in organizational contexts. Some of the immediate manifestations of those power and status dynamics are discussed, as well as their implications for the management of a diverse workforce.

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