Network diversity,contact diversity,and status attainment

We propose that diversity in social relations measured by network diversity and cross-race/cross-gender contacts affords job seekers higher contact status that in turn brings better status attainment outcomes. Controlling for traditional strength of tie measures and other confounders, the empirical study confirms that (1) network diversity in race and gender are significantly associated with actual utilization of cross-race/cross-gender contacts in job search, (2) use of cross-race/cross-gender contacts is significantly related to higher contact status for nonwhite and female job seekers, but (3) contact status (activated social capital) partially provides jobs of higher SEI scores for white job seekers. Similarly, male job seekers obtain better jobs through female contacts, but the same does not apply to female job seekers. These findings show relative return deficits of social capital experienced by racial minorities and females even when they exert extra effort to obtain heterogeneous social relations and contacts.     

Job-search Networks and Wage Attainment in China: A Comparison of Job Changers and Non-changers

This article examines job-search networks and entry-level wage attainment using data from a large-scale survey conducted in eight cities in China in 2009. Two key issues are addressed: (i) how the use of social networks is associated with entry-level wage attainment in urban China, and (ii) whether the patterns of network effects on entry-level wage differ between job changers and first-job seekers. The results show that both strength of ties and social resources of job-search networks are significantly associated with entry-level wage attainment, and that the network effects on entry-level wage are greater for job changers than for first-job seekers. This study offers a solid empirical verification of the associations of weak ties with information and strong ties with influence in an analysis of entry-level wages for job changers and first-job seekers.     

DISCRIMINATION, WOMEN, AND WORK: Processes and Variations by Race and Class

Research on gender and workplace stratification has made clear that persistent employment, wage, and mobility gaps exist, and that discrimination at organizational and interactional levels is playing a role. Few studies, however, have been able to directly capture processes involved. In this article, we draw on unique qualitative and quantitative data pertaining to verified cases of workplace sex and race discrimination (1988 to 2003), and analyze the discriminatory experiences of African-American and white women across various occupational statuses. Notable are high levels of discriminatory firing for both groups, but higher instances of race-based promotional discrimination for black women—a pattern partially linked to their disparate concentration in sex-segregated workplaces and in positions of lower occupational prestige. Our qualitative immersion into case materials reveals influential mechanisms and employer justifications, unique manifestations of differential treatment on the job, and the use of "soft skill" criteria in gatekeeper decision making. We conclude by discussing important dimensions of workplace discrimination for women, variations by social class and race status, and how complexities of status matter for what women experience and gatekeeper behavior.     

NOT SO FAST,MY FRIEND: SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE RACE DISPARITY IN PROMOTIONS AMONG COLLEGE FOOTBALL COACHES

To better understand persistent racial inequality in occupational mobility, we examine the influence of race and social capital on the promotions of 320 assistant college football coaches. The results from quantitative analyses demonstrate that social capital matters a great deal for promotions, but its impact is contingent on the race of the respondent. Specifically, network connections to heterogeneous contacts (racially heterophilous ties, weak ties, and high-status ties) appear to be more effective for black coaches than for white coaches. The findings underscore the importance and complexity of the relationships between race, social capital, and occupational mobility.     

Ask and you shall receive: Social network contacts’ provision of help during the job search

Social network contacts—the people who are asked to help with others’ job searches—are key players in the job networking process. Before job seekers can become employed with the help social networks, contacts must first be able and willing to share the social resources job seekers need for their search. Little is known about the factors that affect contacts’ ability and willingness to do this. Analyses of a unique dataset of contacts show that they typically have access to resources and help job seekers by sharing them. Still, contacts are better able to help when they are male, employed, and better educated than job seekers. They are more willing to help when they perceive job seekers to be “good” workers. In identifying the conditions in which contacts provide social resources, this study illustrates how social networks are a productive job search strategy for some, but not all, job seekers.     

Race,Gender, and the Invisible Hand of Social Capital

To better understand persistent race and gender inequality in the labor market, this article discusses the informal processes by which social connections provide individuals with access to information, influence, and status that help to further people’s careers. Because social networks are segregated by race and gender, access to these social capital resources tends to be greater for white men than for minorities and women. To illustrate this point, research on the invisible hand of social capital is presented. In short, high-level job openings are commonly filled with non-searchers – people who are not looking for new jobs – thanks to their receipt of unsolicited job leads. Recent studies find that this process operates more effectively for white men than for minorities and women, demonstrating how the invisible hand of social capital helps to perpetuate race and gender inequality. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings and directions for future research.     

Race,Gender, and Social Support: A Study of Networks in a Financial Services Organization

A wealth of research indicates that social support improves employees' well-being and job performance. What is not well understood is how employees' race and gender influence the receipt of this type of support. I analyze qualitative and quantitative data to understand how race and gender influence the social support that workers receive. The results suggest that neither structural nor relational factors explain why blacks receive social support from fewer network members than whites. There is some evidence that relational factors contribute to gender differences in the receipt of social support, however. Interviews with workers suggest that gender schemata, the sex-typing of networks, reactions to racial discrimination, and differences in the value placed on social support contribute to race and gender differences in social support.     

Soziale Kontakte als weg aus der Erwerbslosigkeit

When the usefulness of social ties for the improvement of an individual’s labour market position is analysed, the unemployed are hardly ever considered. In this article it is shown how Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties”-theory (1973) can be modified to examine the likelihood of labour market entry of initially unemployed people with low incomes. Using longitudinal data of the German lowincome- panel (“Niedrigeinkommens-Panel”) 1998–2002, it is found that almost one third of the formerly unemployed respondents got their new job through social contacts. Event History Analyses show that a) the more strong social ties jobless have and b) the more heterogeneous their relationships are, the higher the probability that they find a job within the observed period. The significant positive effects of social network features also hold when well-known predictors for labour market performance such as duration of unemployment, health, education, gender, age and support by public employment services are controlled for.     

Untangling Inequalities: Gender,Race, and Socioeconomic Differences in Depression1

In their important paper, Link and Phelan (1995) argue that socioeconomic status is a fundamental cause of variation in well‐being and that the social resources associated with socioeconomic status constitute the fundamental cause of variation in well‐being. In this article, I elaborate on the fundamental cause perspective in three respects: by suggesting an expansion of the definition of resources, by examining how race and gender influence variation in the relationship between resources and mental health, and by developing a model of the relationship between social class, race, and gender that takes account of the potential asymmetry in the influence of resources across race and gender. Using the 2003 National Health Interview Survey and ordinary least squares regression, I find that black and white men are significantly less depressed than black and white women. However, women accrue greater mental health advantage from marriage, home ownership, and education. African‐American men experience less depression as a result of being unmarried and non‐Hispanic white women experience less benefit from full‐time employment, relative to African‐American women and men. Results are discussed in terms of implications for future research on race, class, and gender differences in health.     

社会关系、初职获得方式与职业流动

关系使用者是一个高度异质性的群体,区分不同类型的关系使用者对理解社会关系的作用机制及其对劳动力市场结果变量的效应非常重要。根据初职获得的方式,本研究将劳动者分成三个群体,即通过正式渠道(不使用关系)、正式渠道与关系相结合(正式+关系)以及完全通过关系获得初职的群体。使用2009年八城市社会网络与职业经历问卷调查(JSNET2009)数据,本文探讨了这三个劳动者群体的特征以及他们在职业流动和收入分层模式方面的差异。研究发现,使用正式+关系方式获得初职的劳动者群体和完全通过关系获得初职的劳动者群体的特征及其劳动力市场经历是截然不同的。首先,前者是高社会经济地位的群体,他们有较高的人力资本以及质量最高的社会网络资本;而后者是低社会经济地位的群体,他们自身的人力资本最低,而且社会网络资本的质量也是最差的。其次,后者比前者更可能换工作(离开初职)。第三,两个群体收入获得的决定因素方面也体现出显著的差异。     

Strong or weak ties? British and Indian expatriate scientists finding jobs in Boston

In this article I analyse the different social networks that British and Indian scientists use to obtain job information in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector around Boston, Massachusetts. I argue that individuals' social networks are critical in helping highly skilled migrants find jobs. The research finds that British and Indian scientists use both strong and weak ties to obtain jobs and there is no significant difference between senior and junior workers in terms of whether they relied on strong or weak ties. I argue, nonetheless, that the terms strong ties and weak ties are problematic because they are not clearly understood or mutually exclusive.     

Comparing Offers and Take‐ups of Employee Health Insurance across Race,Gender, and Decade*

How often do U.S. employees receive health insurance offers from employers? When offered, how often do they take up their employer‐based health insurance? This article uses the 1992 and 2002 waves of the National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) to investigate changes in access to (offers) and employees electing to accept, take, or purchase their employers’ health insurance plans (take‐ups) among wage and salaried workers. Although much research has studied employee health benefits, little has examined the intersection of gender and race regarding both offers and take‐ups of such benefits. Logistic regression results indicate that offers and take‐ups of personal health benefits declined from 1992 to 2002, net of salient controls. Further analyses demonstrate that these declines did not affect all workers identically. Offers declined somewhat for both women and men among whites and African Americans, but declined more among Hispanic women and men. Among other ethnoracial groups, offers declined the most among men, but increased among comparable women. Take‐ups declined among white men and Hispanic workers. However, white and African American women's take‐ups did not change and among African American men take‐ups increased. We discuss the need to examine gender and race simultaneously and urge researchers to more closely examine changes in health benefit offers and take‐ups.     

“Family-Friendly” Fringe Benefits and the Gender Wage Gap

Evidence suggests a large portion of the gender wage gap is explained by gender occupational segregation. A common hypothesis is that gender differences in preferences or abilities explain this segregation; women may prefer jobs that provide more “family-friendly” fringe benefits. Much of the research provides no direct evidence on gender differences in access to fringe benefits, nor how provision affects wages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we find that women are more likely to receive family-friendly benefits, but not other types of fringe benefits. We find no evidence that the differences in fringe benefits explain the gender wage gap.

Helping Hands: Race,Neighborhood Context,and Reluctance in Providing Job‐Finding Assistance

In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo‐coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job‐finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race‐based job‐finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.     

The causal effect of social capital on income: A new analytic strategy

This study identifies three groups of job seekers in terms of the channels used to search for jobs: the formal channel involving only official procedures to obtain a job, the informal channel using only social contacts to obtain a job, and the joint channel leveraging both social contacts and official procedures. The analysis of a national sample survey of China shows that joint channel users, due to their relatively higher level of social capital, not only make more job search attempts but also obtain higher income than formal channel users. Meanwhile, joint channel users, because of their relative advantages in both human capital and social capital, not only make more job attempts but also obtain higher income than informal channel users. The two comparisons offer a new strategy to test the causal role social capital plays in labour market success, regardless of whether social capital is exogenous or endogenous to human capital.     

Upgraded to Bad Jobs: Low‐Wage Black Women's Relative Status since 1970

Labor market changes complicate the analysis of black women's status relative to white women because education, occupational attainment, and race–gender are now less predictive of earnings. Low‐wage black women's relative status has improved somewhat from 1970 to 2000, contrary to the well‐documented decrease in relative status reported for all black women wage earners since 1980, but their dramatic occupational upgrading was not responsible for the trend. White‐collar occupational positions formerly responsible for white women's relative earnings advantage no longer deliver that reward, as restructuring has produced a proliferation of bad jobs across occupational groups. This study argues that increasing exposure to precarious work is crucial to understanding changes in low‐wage black women's relative economic status since 1970.     

MALE MARITAL WAGE DIFFERENTIALS: TRAINING,PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS,AND FIXED EFFECTS

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we replicate previous estimates of the marital wage differential for white men, extend the analysis to African American men, then explain the within and between race differentials. We first control for formal job training, then for cognitive skills, parental background, and self‐esteem with little effect. By contrast, the white differential but not the black differential disappears in fixed‐effects estimation. We reconcile the cross‐section/panel differentials by focusing on the distinct identification conditions employed by each technique. Men who never change marital status play a significant role in white cross‐sectional estimates. (JEL J31, J12)     

Don’t mention it: Why people don’t share job information,when they do,and why it matters

Network-based job search is especially likely to foster workplace segregation and limit status attainment when information flows through homophilous ties. This paper takes the perspective of information holders and examines how the use of strong versus weak ties – which tend to be homophilous and heterophilous, respectively – differs with characteristics of labour markets in which jobs are located. Using in-depth interviews with entry-level white collar workers I show that information holders with opportunities to mention specific jobs to specific people do so only 27% of the time. Because they hesitate to share information if they are uncertain the information is specifically sought, information flows more commonly to strong ties, whose career goals are more likely to be known. Information is more likely to be shared with weak ties if it concerns occupations for which one may be specifically credentialed, since receiving relevant training serves as signal of interest in such jobs. These finding suggest that the homophily of referrals and their inequality-generating effects may vary across occupations.     

Moving Through Social Networks: The Case of Armenian Migrants in the Czech Republic

This paper brings attention to the role of social networks in the migration of asylum seekers and explores how the embeddedness of the migrants in social networks both facilitates and constrains their mobility in different phases of the migration process. It reconstructs the migration paths of eight Armenian migrant families who arrived in the Czech Republic as asylum seekers during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty‐first century. By examining the narrated stories of the Armenian migrants it shows that social networks formed an important context for employing various migration strategies in all phases of the migration process, and that the meaning and character of migrants’ social networks changed over time. In the initial phase of decision‐making about migration as well as on their journey, it was mainly weak ties of random acquaintances that played a dominant role. The position of the migrants in those networks was rather insecure. They held a little control over the information they received, but in these vulnerable situations they had to rely on their weak ties, which strongly influenced their mobility. In the arrival and settlement phases the social context of the refugee camp hindered the cultivation of social ties outside the migrants’ circle on one hand, and facilitated development of bonding ties among the migrants on the other. Bonding social networks enabled inclusion of the Armenian migrants into various social spheres especially at the beginning of the settlement process. However, the bounded character of these networks was also recognized as excluding them from access to resources of the dominant society and preventing their social mobility in later phases of their settlement. Thus, bridging networks that provide access to certain resources of the dominant society were sought.     

Gender and Networks in a Local Voluntary-Sector Elite

Focusing on gender inequality in a local community elite, we investigate the role of gender in access to and participation in networks of nonprofit trustees in Louisville, Kentucky. We examine two types of network relations: participation in the network of overlapping board memberships (the structural network) and interpersonal ties of collegiality and friendship (the social network). Asking whether the gender hierarchy found in most private and public sector organizations is mirrored in this inner circle of trustees, with men occupying the most influential positions in the structural and social networks, we find some male advantage in the structural network. Men predominate in holding most board seats, occupying multiple board seats, and in having slightly greater network centrality. By contrast, women hold the edge in the social network, with slightly greater centrality and higher levels of social integration. Women's disadvantage in the structural network is at least partly counterbalanced by their prominence in the social network of trustees in Louisville. Results indicate that the local nonprofit sector includes a small number of women (but no people of color) in leadership roles.