Social Capital and Finding a Job: Do Contacts Matter?

By Ted Mouw. American Sociological Review, 2003

676 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does social capital affect labor market outcomes? The prevalent use of job contacts to find work suggests that “who you know” is an important means of getting a good job. Network theories of social capital argue that well-connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties. Although a number of studies have found a positive relationship between measures of social capital and wages and/or occupational prestige, little is known about the causal effect of social networks on labor market outcomes. Four data sets are used to reassess findings on the role of social capital in the labor market. A test of causality is proposed based on the argument that if social capital variables do have a causal effect on job outcomes, then workers with high levels of social capital should be more likely to use contacts to find work, all else being equal. Results suggest that much of the effect of social capital in the existing literature reflects the tendency for similar people to become friends rather than a causal effect of friends’ characteristics on labor market outcomes.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8332e6f57efd2830d81ba78dbfa583e002ec7870

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Citations in the corpus

Social Contacts and the Economic Performance of Immigrants: A Panel Study of Immigrants in Germany 1 (2012, background): “The positive correlation between social contacts and economic outcomes for immigrants may also be spurious, merely reflecting the fact that people with similar backgrounds tend to associate with each other (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, 2001; Mouw, 2003, 2006).”
Networking as a job search behaviour: A social network perspective (2009, methodology): “On the basis of previous research (Aguilera, 2002; Brown & Konrad, 2001; Mouw, 2003; Reingold, 1999), three items (a ¼ .86) were developed for measuring tie status or the status of the people to whom job seekers are tied who might help them find a job.”
Estimating the Causal Effect of Social Capital: A Review of Recent Research (2006, neutral): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. CAUSAL EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL 91 Gordon et al. (2004) use longitudinal data on gang membership and delinquent behavior and find strong effects of gang membership on self-reported behavior of adolescents using fixed effects models.”
Bringing Managers Back In (2011, background): “In the second key approach to dealing with the issue of true performance, I exploit some natural experiments regarding performance evaluations of the same employee (for a similar approach, see Mouw 2002, 2003).”
Scar Effects of Unemployment: An Assessment of Institutional Complementarities (2006, background): “Lack of networks extending to other geographical areas or occupations may similarly hamper workers’ opportunity for economic adaptation to job loss because the unemployed workers may be cut off from potentially relevant information (e.g., T. Korpi 2001; Mouw 2003).”
One of Us or One of My Friends: How Social Identity and Tie Strength Shape the Creative Generativity of Boundary-Spanning Ties (2014, methodology): “Additionally, we apply this fixed effects approach to an ordered probit model (e.g., Mouw, 2003), since our dependent variable is a survey scale with five discrete ordinal values.2”
The Impact of Origin and Host Country Schooling on the Economic Performance of Immigrants (2009, background): “Furthermore, social contacts can influence the job-matching process by providing entry into desirable occupations (Lin 1999; Mouw 2003).”
Social Influence Given (Partially) Deliberate Matching: Career Imprints in the Creation of Academic Entrepreneurs1 (2017, background): “…to the challenge of establishing evidence of causal social influences in observational data (e.g., Winship and Morgan 1999; Van den Bulte and Lilien 2001; Mouw 2003; Reagans, Zuckerman, and McEvily 2007; Stuart and Sorenson 2009; Aral, Muchnik, and Sundararajan 2009; Shalizi and Thomas 2010).”
The role of social contacts in the employment status of immigrants (2011, background): “…contacts and employment opportunities has been largely theorized and researched in the literature on general populations (Boxman et al., 1991; Burt, 1992; Granovetter, 1973; Ioannides and Loury, 2004; Lin, 1999; Mouw, 2002, 2003), but only a few applications are found in the migration literature.”
Finding a Job in the Internet Age (2005, background): “Since neither parties have perfect information, much theoretical (Granovetter 1973, 1991; Montgomery 1991, 1992) and empirical (Granovetter [1974] 1995; Lin, Ensel, and Vaughn 1981; Mouw 2003) work has focused on examining the way that workers and employers fi nd out about one another.”
Social Networks and Labour Market Outcomes: The Non-Monetary Benefits of Social Capital (2006, background): “Thus, also our results show that searching via social contacts has no monetary advantage (Mouw, 2003) and, moreover, might even have negative effects (see De Graaf and Flap, 1988; Flap and Boxmann, 2001).”
The individual experience of unemployment. (2012, background): “These findings may be confounded, however, because job seekers with better qualifications may be the ones with higher-quality connections (Mouw 2003).”