A little help from my friends? Navigating the tension between social capital and meritocracy in the job search (Record no. 530985)
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| fixed length control field | 02131nam a22001457a 4500 |
| 008 - FIXED-LENGTH DATA ELEMENTS--GENERAL INFORMATION | |
| fixed length control field | 250722b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d |
| 100 ## - MAIN ENTRY--PERSONAL NAME | |
| Personal name | Adler, Laura and Ayala-Hurtado, Elena |
| 245 ## - TITLE STATEMENT | |
| Title | A little help from my friends? Navigating the tension between social capital and meritocracy in the job search |
| 260 ## - PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC. (IMPRINT) | |
| Place of publication, distribution, etc | Administrative Science Quarterly |
| 300 ## - PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION | |
| Extent | 70(2), Jun, 2025: p.496-537 |
| 520 ## - SUMMARY, ETC. | |
| Summary, etc | Job seekers often rely on help from social ties in the search for employment. Yet the job search is characterized by meritocratic ideals according to which candidates should be selected based on their qualifications, not their connections. How do people justify the use of connections given the conflicting cultural logics of social capital and meritocracy? We conduct an inductive analysis of 56 interviews with young Spaniards experiencing a difficult labor market and identify a novel process of justification, situational alignment, that reconciles these conflicting logics. Respondents justified situations in which connections provided assistance as legitimate when they perceived alignment among the job seeker, job, and type of help that connections provided. Respondents deemed illegitimate the situations in which these were not aligned. These justifications allowed respondents to embrace the social capital logic’s prescription to use connections, while upholding the meritocratic principle that jobs be awarded based on qualifications. We further find that situations involving close ties were more readily justified than those involving distant others. We test this inductively derived process using a survey experiment with 1,536 young Spaniards. This study demonstrates that perceptions of merit are situated, and advances the understanding of social capital by identifying a novel process of justification that contributes to labor market inequality.- Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00018392251318974 |
| 650 ## - SUBJECT ADDED ENTRY--TOPICAL TERM | |
| Topical term or geographic name as entry element | Labor, markets, Job search, Cultural logics, Social capital, Meritocracy. |
| 9 (RLIN) | 55548 |
| 773 ## - HOST ITEM ENTRY | |
| Main entry heading | Administrative Science Quarterly |
| 942 ## - ADDED ENTRY ELEMENTS (KOHA) | |
| Item type | Articles |
| Withdrawn status | Lost status | Source of classification or shelving scheme | Damaged status | Not for loan | Permanent location | Current location | Date acquired | Serial Enumeration / chronology | Barcode | Date last seen | Koha item type |
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| Indian Institute of Public Administration | Indian Institute of Public Administration | 2025-07-22 | 70(2), Jun, 2025: p.496-537 | AR136698 | 2025-07-22 | Articles |