Getting a Job

"You can’t talk about economic sociology without talking about Mark Granovetter. Getting a Job is a classic work of economic sociology. It’s really the only book he wrote – he’s mostly an articles academic. Getting A Job started as Granovetter’s Harvard PhD dissertation, in the early 1970s. It is a very interesting study of how people get jobs. His findings won’t seem groundbreaking in 2012, but in 1973 they were. He interviewed both middle- and working-class people in the Boston area to find out how different kinds of people got jobs. What he discovered is that the way people mostly get jobs is through secondary ties – not through close ties or associates but through people they know less well. And, obviously, social ties are often associated with social class. Generally, the people you know share your socioeconomic status. Therefore, the opportunities you have are determined by where you start out. The book had a huge effect on our understanding of stratification and economic sociology. He came to call this “the strength of weak ties”. Our modern concept of networking as a way to accomplish things in modern life comes from what Granovetter was able to demonstrate in this book. He’s one of the people who brought network analysis into sociology and into the public view. At Harvard, Mark was a student of Harrison White, who pioneered formal network techniques in sociology. Mark showed how to use the ideas in an economic context. He points out that social ties affect economic outcomes. An economist looks at getting a job as an information problem, an impersonal process. You search and you have a cost benefit analysis and you decide. Granovetter introduces the whole idea of social structure into economic processes. He underscores that the social is part of the economic; that what should be entirely economic – how you get a job – is completely shaped by social networks. Subsequent to Granovetter, other people took up this idea and used it in other contexts. He popularised the notion of social networks. Sociologists have this term – performativity. It means that when people become aware of a certain idea or concept they can take that idea and mobilise it. This is a basic sociological process. Humans borrow ideas and then put them into play in new and novel ways. That’s performativity – people performing new ideas. Once you understand the logic of network analysis you can deploy it in all kinds of contexts. For example, Facebook suggests “friends” based on network analysis. If you have two friends and I have three friends, two of whom are the two that you have, Facebook thinks you might know my third friend because we’re structurally equivalent. Structural equivalence is one of the ways Amazon figures out what kind of books you might want. So a lot of the stuff on the Internet performs network theory and by doing so makes changes in the way people think and operate. Additionally, the business models of Facebook and LinkedIn seem based on these network models. Research shows most people use these applications for people that are already in their lives. You have people out there friending 500 others but there’s always a core group of about 15 who are really communicating with each other. This is true in normal life as well. So, in some ways, the Internet mirrors the way people act offline."