Ofer Sharone

Social Capital Activation and Job Searching: Embedding the Use of Weak Ties in the American Institutional Context

By comparing job seekers’ use of weak ties in Israel and the United States, this article shows that Granovetter’s canonical findings are rooted in the particular institutional context of the American white-collar labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with three distinct groups of white-collar job seekers: Americans searching in the United States, Israelis searching in Israel, and Israelis searching in the United States, this article untangles cultural and institutional factors underlying the use of weak ties and shows how labor market institutions and processes of hiring shape systematic variations in job seekers’ utilization of weak ties.

LinkedIn or LinkedOut? How Social Networking Sites are Reshaping the Labor Market

Abstract The rapid growth of online social networking sites (“SNS”) such as LinkedIn and Facebook has created new forms of online labor market intermediation that are reconfiguring the hiring process in profound ways; yet, little is understood about the implications of these new technologies for job seekers navigating the labor market, or more broadly, for the careers and lives of workers. The existing literature has focused on digital inequality – workers’ unequal access to or skilled use of digital technologies – but has left unanswered critical questions about the emerging and broad effects of SNS as a labor market intermediary. Drawing on in-depth interviews with unemployed workers this paper describes job seekers’ experiences using SNS to look for work. The findings suggest that SNS intermediation of the labor market has two kinds of effects. First, as an intermediary for hiring, SNS produces labor market winners and losers involving filtering processes that often have little to do with evaluations of merit. Second, SNS filtering processes exert new pressures on all workers, whether winners or losers as perceived though this new filter, to manage their careers, and to some extent their private lives, in particular ways that fit the logic of the SNS-mediated labor market.