A little help from my friends? Navigating the tension between social capital and meritocracy in the job search
By: Adler, Laura and Ayala-Hurtado, Elena
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: Administrative Science Quarterly Description: 70(2), Jun, 2025: p.496-537.Subject(s): Labor, markets, Job search, Cultural logics, Social capital, Meritocracy
In:
Administrative Science QuarterlySummary: 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
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 70(2), Jun, 2025: p.496-537 | Available | AR136698 |
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
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