Institutional constraints and social capital of individuals in the labor markets: Comparison among the United States, China, and Taiwan

Employing the unique Social Capital Project surveys conducted in 2004-5 in the United States, China, and Taiwan with at least 3,000 respondents from each society, I found that institutional constraints played critical roles in determining the amount of accessed social capital and the efficacy of activated social capital in job search process in the labor markets. Applying regression models and structural equation modeling to the identical position generator measures in the three data sets, I identified that China under the twofold institutional constraints of socialist political economy and Confucian culture retained the least amount of accessed social capital in comparison with the other two capitalist societies, the United States and Taiwan according to the SEM latent mean comparison. In regard to the activation of social capital in job search process, I found that the effect of social capital was suppressed under the socialist control in China. I also found that Taiwan experienced the greatest gender inequality in status attainment process due to Confucian cultural influence. I thus suggest that future research should take political and cultural institutions of target societies into account in order to examine the net effect of social capital rather than unconditionally replicating the pre-established conceptual schema in the literature in spite of significant differences in macroinstitutional arrangements varying across societies.