Weak Ties, Information, and Influence: How Workers Find Jobs in a Local Russian Labor Market

Abstract

In 1973 Granovetter formulated the strength-of-weak-ties hypothesis (SWT), which became the foundation of a vast sociological literature on social networks in labor markets. Until now, SWT has never been directly tested but treated instead as a surrogate for the relationship between an actor's network and labor market outcomes such as characteristics of a job obtained. The paper restates SWT as a proposition about the probability of getting a job as a function of within-actor differences in tie strength and tests it with data on hires carried out in one Russian city in 1998. In support of SWT, the results show that a worker is more likely to get a job through one of her weak ties rather than strong ties. The advantages of weak ties lie in their abilities to provide timely access to non-redundant information and to influence employers directly. In contrast, strong ties are associated with indirect influence on employers through well-connected intermediaries. The estimates come from a within-worker fixed-effect conditional logistic regression and thereby provide rare evidence of an association between information and influence transferred through social ties and labor market outcomes, independent of workers' individual characteristics.