Social Resources and Mobility Outcomes: A Replication and Extension

Abstract

We replicate and extend studies of job-matching by Lin, Ensel, and Vaughn (1981) and Bridges and Villemez (1986), concentrating on the effects of social network resources on the following outcomes of job-changes: occupational prestige, wages, industrial sector, firm size, possession of authority, and closeness of supervision. Our replication confirms major findings of prior work, and demonstrates that these are not affected by incidental selection bias or the absence of controls for the immediately preceding levels of outcome variables. Our extensions, however, qualify the social resources argument by indicating that effects of different social resource measures are largely outcome-specific: no single measure among those studied appears as a general indicator of “social capital” providing advantages in matching people to a broad range of valued outcomes. The analyses also show no significant net effects of tie strength on either mobility outcomes or access to social resources.