Occupational Interactions And Incomes

Occupational interactions are important in the work and life of contemporary urbanites.On the one hand,production and consumption mechanisms in modern society determine that enterprises,governments and social organizations are inextricably linked to each other.On the other hand,regardless of the bureaucracy or the flat management,interpersonal interaction centering on the working unit is an important and indispensable part of modern career life.From the perspective of social capital,interpersonal interactions,either inside or outside the work place,are able to bring opportunities for resource exchanges,relationship building and maintaining to individuals in the workplace.In present studies on social capitals in China,scholars focus on the impact of resources outside the workplace,such as relational networks of friends and family on the individual labor market outcomes in the workplace.However,analysis on social capitals in a workplace concentrates in most cases on the organization and management fields.There are only a few papers focusing on occupational social capital and they are mostly limited to discussions about the relationship between leaders and subordinates.In addition,only cross-section data is adopted.They are thus not persuasive enough in terms of casual inferences.This paper attempts to extend such a research scope in the field of quantitative study on social capital,to examine whether the relational network associated with theprofessional field domain has any influence on income for people in workplace.This study aims to explore the impact of social resources within the workplace in individual incomes among Chinese urban residents,using data provided by JSNET2009.To adequately address the endogeneity problem,we use the first-order difference method to help identify models.During analysis,three hypotheses were put forward.The results indicate that:(1)both the internal and the outward interactions have positive effects on incomes.No matter whether the benchmsark difference model was based on a sample size of more than 6,000 or a precise difference model based on a sample size of over 2,000,our analysis results all indicated that both internal and outward interactions play positive roles in determining the income of laborers;(2)the effect of outward interactions is stronger than that of internal interaction.Both the benchmark difference model and the precise difference model,the outward interaction is more important.A more critical effect of outward interaction is its reflection of the important values of heterogeneous social resources;and(3)the effect of outward interactions is stronger in the state-owned sector in comparison with the private sector.In addition,this paper also probed into the relationship between occupational interaction and marketization degree.After interaction item analysis,it was found that the interaction item coefficient for outward interaction and the state-owned sector is significantly negative,which signifies that in cities in China,the impact of heterogeneous social resources on income in non-state sectors are stronger than state-owned sectors.Such a feature of social capitals in the workplace is almost opposite to the social capital based on personal relationships.Our findings add to the understandings of the causal effect of social capital and heterogeneous resources.Compared with traditional cross section model results,the casual explanatory power of the analysis and results presented in this paper is more intense;besides,sample size of first-order difference is also larger and more robust than in former studies.Our differential study is thus a further expansion of previous analysis.Without a doubt,deficiencies still exist in such an analysis.First,the factor of urban change is not taken into consideration.Although it is less likely for cities to affect occupational interaction and income simultaneously,cities where individuals live are set to be invariant according to the difference model;in real life,however,the workplaces for first and present jobs may differ.Second,even though the factor of individual ability that does not change with time is under control,it still cannot be inferred that endogeneity problems have been solved comprehensively,because some individual heterogeneity may vary with time and such issues need to be tackled by means of instrumental variable.Third,our data is derived from eight cities in China,so that differences may lie in the marketization degree of metropolis and small to medium-sized cities.Hence,we hope to take advantage of a counter-factual model to analyze labor market effects of occupational interaction more powerfully based on more data.Meanwhile,we also appeal for more attention towards social capitals in workplaces.