A Study On Social Capital And Peasant Workers' Employment In Urban China

The employment of peasant workers in urban China is a serious socio-economic issue that has already drawn common attention of the government and the public. This dissertation is an endeavor to study the process of the peasant workers' employment, using the theoretical perspective of social capital which focuses on the accessible resources that embedded in one's social network and one can obtain from the social institutions. In this dissertation, I specially distinguish two different types of social capital, the relative social capital and the contractual social capital, and describe the occupancy and usage of social capital in the process of peasant workers' employment, then try to indicate the accumulating mechanism of social capital and the corresponding countermeasures.The structure of this dissertation is arranged as follow: Chapter one introduces the background and the meaning of the theme, the literature review, the definition of social capital and the analytical methods. Chapter two reviews the traditional rural-urban migration decision-making theories, and points out that social capital should be a significant variable in peasant workers' migration decision-making model, and tries to advance the traditional models. Chapter three uses social network analytical method to measure social capital of peasant workers and make a comparative analysis between the effect of social capital and human capital on employment of peasant workers. Chapter four introduces usage of social capital of peasant workers during the process of job seeking through reviewing the job-seeking approaches and the characteristics of contacts of peasant workers. Chapter five introduces accumulating mechanism and the investors of social capital and indicates that citizenization is the aim of social capital accumulation.