The Social Capital Of Laid-off Workers Re-employed

The re-employment of laid-off workers in China has become a serious social problem that drew the attention of the government and the public. This dissertation is an endeavor to study the process of the job search process and re-employment of laid-off workers, using the theoretical perspective of social capital which focuses on the accessible resource embedded in one's social network. In this dissertation, I specifically distinguish the different effect of possessed social capital and used social capital in one's job search process. The former refers to the total amount of embedded network resources, while the later refers to the social capital actually used when one was trying to get a job.In the first five chapters, I test three hypotheses about the effect of possessed social capital on the re-employment of laid-off workers, namely the network size effect, network density effect, and embedded network resource effect. The results of multiple linear regression analysis show that the size effect and density effect is not significant, while the embedded resources effect is very prominent. To get a further understanding of re-employment of laid-off workers, I also involve the human capital and institutional capital as independent variables in regression analysis. The results show that human capital is a very important variable in explaining the result of re-employment. However, institutional capital shows minor effect on the re-employment of laid-off workers.In chapter 6 and chapter 7, the research mainly focuses on the used social capital in the re-employment. I analyze the use of social network channel, the resources flowing in the network, and the characteristic of contact in the job search process of the laid-off workers. I find that the network channel is more frequently used by these workers, and the use of network channel will increase the probability of re-employment. However, those workers who used network channel generally get worse jobs, i.e., jobs with lower income and lower prestige. I also find that the workers tend to get "influence", instead of "information", from the network. Although weak-tie-contacts are more frequently used by laid-off workers, their effect on re-employment are not significant, which provide no support for the-strength-of-weak-tie hypothesis proposed by Granovetter. However, in chapter 8,1 find that tie strength has different effect on different social groups. For people in higher social status, weak ties are more useful, while people in lower social status will use strong ties more frequently because, with few social resources, they have to depend on the obligations based on kinship or emotional interaction. In chapter 8 I also proved that the strong tie is capable of becoming the bridge that links two different social groups, in the premise that the strong tie contact has the experience of social mobility.China's social transition is the institutional background of my study. Therefore, the different effect of social capital in different period of labor market construction is also a focus of this dissertation. I found that the significance of social capital in the process of re-employment is fading with the construction of labor market, while human capital become more and more important in this process. These results show that China is steadily stepping into a market society.