Employment Networks

Craftsmen's guilds and trade unions were highly effective employment networks from the early Middle Ages throughout the modern era, when cyberspace environments established virtual relationships that have transformed the material environment, especially economically. Employment conditions in the postmodern workplace are increasingly global, impersonal, and transitional. Many individuals are now knowledge workers, and organizations labor in a multicultural, multinational service economy. Their technology-bound virtual workplaces, disconnected from specific times and places, coexist with the material objects in their offices: the desk, the chairs, the coffee machine.

In the realm of underemployed and unemployed workers, contingent workers, what Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole call “disposable” workers, and of “jobless recovery” from global recessions, both the value and the complexity of social networks are substantially increased. It has been well established by organizational scholars and human resources professionals that about eight out of 10 blue-collar jobs are never advertised; rather, these are filled through contacts with coworkers, friends, and family. White-collar employees rely on interpersonal contacts through their social networks at least 60 percent of the time, and increases in this percentage correlate directly to the number of years the person has been in her or his career.

Concepts from theories of communication, sociology, and economics can be useful in understanding the nature of social networks as they relate to organizational functions and purposes. These concepts may assist job seekers and employers to consciously tap into the discursive power inherent in social networks through the use of network mapping of weak and strong ties, direct and indirect links, and link strength and symmetry.

There are many theories that are relevant to the study of professional and employment networks at various levels of analysis. Among these social scientific theories are structuration theory, attraction theory, homophily theory, social exchange theory, focus theory, and embeddedness theory. An understanding of these scholarly perspectives can assist in their effectiveness in employment networking. Additionally, organizational scholars studying the operations of systems and networks in the workplace contribute useful insights relative to employment, including strong and weak ties and realistic job previews.