Creation and Returns of Social Capital by Henk Flap Beate Völker

Author:Henk Flap, Beate Völker [Henk Flap, Beate Völker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Methodology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780415300599
Google: W0WVmAEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-01-15T04:39:52+00:00

Use of contacts and other job-search methods

As presented in Table 7.2, when respondents were asked to report the methods of job search they used for their current (or last) job (allowing multiple choices), over half (52.9 percent) claimed that they were assigned to the current work unit and job, and another third reported promotion (7.9 percent) or took examination by the work unit (30.1 percent). About 15 percent (14.8 percent) reported the use of personal contacts. Even though this percentage was relatively low, it was the third-highest-mentioned method. No doubt, this percentage is a substantial under-estimation of the actual usage. It should be borne in mind that for over four decades the labor market in China had been dictated by the state (Bian 1994). Jobs were allocated annually to each work unit. Available labor candidates were assigned to the units with a primarily top-down allocation system. City and district labor bureaus were responsible for finding the correct number of applicants for each work unit receiving vacancies. Families of applicants used their extensive connections and networks (the ‘back doors’) to get their children to the more desirable work units, usually institutes and agencies (where ‘mental’ work was used) rather than enterprises or production units (where ‘physical’ work was used). These institutes and agencies, mostly supervised by the state directly or indirectly, also offered other fringe benefits (e.g. better working conditions, better schools for employees’ children, better housing, better pension) not readily available to workers in enterprises. Similar situation and patterns were observed by Völker and Flap in the former East Germany (1999).

Using the ‘back doors’, no matter how rampant, was, however, officially frowned upon and considered as illegal. Thus, until the late 1990s, it would be politically incorrect to make any public mention of ‘seeking’ rather than ‘receiving’ job assignments, let alone mentioning using informal connections. Even in the later 1990s and early 2000s, publicly owned (by the state or the local government) work units outnumber private and other types of organizations by a substantial margin (estimates range between 75 percent and 90 percent) and much of the labor market in the public sector is largely dictated by the ‘allocation’ system. Thus, the use of personal contacts in job seeking, while probably less a taboo, remains a behavior much more often done than spoken of in public.

More females (21.3 percent) than males (16.2 percent) indicated the use of personal contacts (helpers), and the difference was highly significant (p0.000). One possible reason might be that, for whatever reason, males were more sensitive to the taboo of using personal contacts in job searches.

To further probe the ‘actual’ usage of personal contacts, we asked another question: how many helpers they actually had in getting the current job. Interestingly, 19.1 percent, or 584 of them, reported one or

Table 7.2 Use of personal contacts and chains of helpers

more helpers (see the second panel in Table 7.2). This is a significant increase from 11.4 percent reported in the use of personal contacts (help by family members or others, see the first panel).

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