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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

weak ties social capital job searching qualitative methods cross-national comparison culture

The use of personal contacts to find work is an age-old phenomenon. A 1930s study found that more than half of the workers at the hosiery factories of Philadelphia had found their jobs through personal ties (De Schweinetz, 1932). This method of finding a job is not limited to any particular class or occupation. No less a talent than Albert Einstein relied on whom he knew rather than what he knew to obtain his first professional job (De Graaf & Flap, 1988).

The use of ties among white-collar workers began to receive intense scholarly attention with Granovetter’s (1973, 1974/1995) groundbreaking research showing the significant extent to which American white-collar workers use social ties to find jobs and, counterintuitively, finding that more workers found their jobs through weak rather than strong ties. Granovetter theorized that weak ties were more effective than strong ties because they provide nonredundant information about job openings. Although many scholars find Granovetter’s explanation compelling, studies examining the efficacy of weak ties outside the United States have yielded mixed results (e.g., Bian, 1997; Yakubovic, 2005).

The existing literature’s ongoing debate on the efficacy of weak ties leaves largely unexamined an equally important question regarding the activation of weak ties. Specifically, under what institutional conditions do actors, such as job seekers, attempt to utilize weak ties? The dearth of studies on this issue leaves unclear the institutional underpinnings for Granovetter’s (1973, 1974/1995) findings regarding the extensive utilization of weak ties among American white-collar job seekers and, more broadly, the institutional conditions that facilitate or inhibit efforts to activate weak ties. The absence of comparative qualitative data leaves actors’ understandings and strategies regarding the use of weak ties in a black box and therefore leaves the existing literature unable to effectively account for systematic variations in the activation of weak ties.

This article opens this black box by comparing white-collar job seekers’ understandings and practices in activating weak ties to find work in two advanced economies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with three distinct groups of white-collar job seekers—Americans searching for work in the United States, Israelis searching in Israel, and Israelis searching in the United States—this article examines the factors underlying the activation of weak ties and shows the hitherto unrecognized role of labor market institutions and processes of hiring in accounting for systematic variations. Specifically, this article links the well-documented efforts of American white-collar job seekers to activate weak ties (Lane, 2011; Sharone, 2013b; Smith, 2001) to the particular institutions structuring the American white-collar labor market. More broadly, by examining the link between labor market institutions and job seekers’ utilization of ties, this article contributes to our understanding of the interrelationship between institutional structures and agents’ activation of social networks.

Weak-Tie Activation: Granovetter and Theories of Variations

In Granovetter’s study (1973, 1974/1995), white-collar workers who found their jobs through personal contacts used weak ties more often than strong ties. Granovetter’s canonical explanation for this finding focuses on the distinct usefulness of information obtained from weak ties. As Granovetter (1973) put it: “Those to whom we are weakly tied are more likely to move in circles different from our own and will thus have access to information different from that which we receive” (p. 1371). It is the access to new information about job opportunities that makes weak ties strong.

The existing literature has focused on the efficacy of using weak ties across social contexts and reveals mixed results. Yakubovic (2005), studying the Russian labor market, finds support for Granovetter’s (1973, 1974/1995) thesis on the efficacy of weak ties, whereas Bian (1997) finds that strong ties were more useful in 1980s China. Other studies find that the strength of ties is not significant (e.g., Korpi, 2001; Marsden & Hulbert, 1988). In explaining these variations, the literature has focused on how contextual factors shape the usefulness of information obtained from social ties. For example, Burt (1977) finds that social ties are more valuable sources of information for managers with few peers than for managers with many peers. Other studies have focused on the variations arising from the nature of the information to be transmitted by social ties. Aral and Alstyne (2011) find that if one needs thick information in an environment where there is rapid change, strong ties are better able to provide such information than weak ties. Pointing to a trade-off between “diversity” and “bandwidth,” Aral and Alstyne find that while “the prevailing wisdom among sociologists for the last 40 years has been that the strength of weak ties and informational advantages to brokerage operate with a fair degree of regularity across contexts, our analysis shows that context matters” (p. 148). Specifically, in contexts with more “information turbulence,” strong ties—which come with greater bandwidth—may be more valuable than weak ties with their more diverse forms of information (Aral & Alstyne, 2011, p. 148; Reagans & McEvily, 2003).

Another set of studies claims that cross-national variations with respect to the efficacy of ties are attributable to cultural factors. Pointing out that most prior research on the use of weak ties has been conducted in the West, these studies argue that the literature fails to sufficiently consider the effects of culture—specifically, cultural contexts characterized by collectivism rather than individualism (Ma, Huang, & Shenkar, 2011; Xiao & Tsui, 2007). Utilizing conceptions of culture rooted in the management literature (e.g., Hofstede, 2001), which are challenged by many contemporary sociologists (e.g., Swidler, 1986), these articles argue that collectivist cultural contexts entail high levels of cooperation among one’s in group and hence make the use of strong ties and closed networks effective, while the same cultural context entails comparatively low levels of cooperation with members from out groups and thus renders less effective the utilization of weak ties or structural holes.

Shifting the focus from abstract cultural contexts to concrete institutions, Bian (1997) examines the role of labor market practices in 1980s China—in the era, predating market reforms, when state officials allocated jobs. Bian finds that in the institutional context of state socialism, strong ties are more effective than weak ties because helping one’s ties in the hiring process requires state officials to engage in risky unauthorized activity. Given these risks, job seekers could rely on only strong ties—or the strong ties of strong ties—who would be highly motivated to help them on the basis of a past relationship of trust and mutual obligation. Although Bian provides a compelling explanation for the reliance on strong ties in a socialist context given its very distinct hiring process, it is not clear to what extent these findings may apply to white-collar workers in advanced market economies.

In sum, prior studies focus on a host of contextual factors that may shape the efficacy of weak versus strong ties. However, to date, less attention has been paid to how contextual factors shape the activation of weak ties. Although Bian (1997) focuses on the efficacy of weak versus strong ties, his focus on how contexts may shape the motivation of ties to help provides an important point of departure for considering mechanisms that may explain variations in the activation of weak ties. As the social capital literature has recently emphasized, to account for the use of weak ties to find jobs, our research focus must expand beyond the potential usefulness of the information obtained from such ties and address the question of motivation (Marin, 2012; Obukhova, 2012). Job seekers are likely to invest time and energy in attempting to activate weak ties only if they perceive some sources of motivation for such weak ties to help them.

The unclear motivation of weak ties was recognized by Granovetter (1974/1995) and was one of the reasons that his findings about the prevalent use of weak ties were considered counterintuitive. As Granovetter (1973) put it, “a natural a priori idea is that those with whom one has strong ties are more motivated to help with job information” (p. 1371). The motivation of weak ties is particularly puzzling when we realize just how weak some such ties are. In Granovetter’s (1974/1995, p. 81) study, some weak ties provided useful information even in cases where the ties “had barely been maintained at all” for periods as long as 20 years. Granovetter (1973) himself noted that it is a remarkable fact that “people receive crucial information from individuals whose very existence they have forgotten” (p. 1372).

Why would a forgotten weak tie pass on valuable information? The question can be asked even more pointedly in light of Granovetter’s (1974/1995, p. 28) finding that the weakest of the weak ties, those who had only “rarely” been in touch, also tended to put in a “good word” about the job seeker to the employer and thus, to some extent, put themselves on the line. What would motivate weak ties whose existence one has nearly forgotten both to pass on valuable information about job openings and to put in a good word with the employer?

Granovetter (1974/1995, p. 54) offers an explanation for why weak ties—who, unlike strong ties, are “not likely to be under any particular pressure” to help their job-seeking contacts—might nonetheless do so. He claims that “those who are able to recruit competent personnel may find their reputations enhanced; they will appear to be people who know how to get things done” (p. 55). A recent study of the referring behavior of insurance agents in Toronto lends support to Granovetter’s claim, finding that white-collar workers refer weak ties not only because it is the “obvious and nice thing to do” but also because they see such referrals as opportunities to enhance their reputations (Marin, 2012, p. 186).

The literature’s understanding of the motivation of weak ties is premised on the notion that a successful match yields a win–win–win outcome. The referee gets valuable help in his or her job search, the employer gets a good new employee, and the referrer enhances his or her reputation with the employer. The apparent benefits that flow to all involved leads Granovetter (1974/1995) to wonder about the extent to which the mechanisms that motivate the activation and responsiveness of weak ties in the American white-collar labor market would also yield similar outcomes in different social contexts. When considering whether his findings are “peculiar to higher white-collar workers in Massachusetts” or are “aspects of the human condition,” Granovetter (1974/1995, p. 119) acknowledges that there are very few existing data on this subject outside the American context, but sees “no reason to expect processes in industrial non-American markets … to be radically different from those reported here” (p. 130). Cautiously limiting his statement about potential generalizability to a double negative, he notes that “it is not clear that my results do not reflect the situation in a wide variety of economies” (Granovetter, 1974/1995, p.130). He is explicit that “positive conclusions must await further research” (p. 130). This article begins to provide that much-needed further research.

No comparative research to date has qualitatively explored cross-national variations in job seekers’ efforts to activate weak ties or how contextual factors shape job seekers’ understandings of labor-market processes—most critically their understandings of the motivations of weak ties—and consequently their strategies in activating weak ties. The existing literature acknowledges this gap. Granovetter (1974/1995), in the Afterward to the second edition of his book, notes the continued scarcity of comparative data. This lack of data has also been observed by Gerber and Mayorova (2010) and Xiao and Tsui (2007).

This article compares the use of weak ties by white-collar job seekers in two advanced market economies and shows that the activation of weak ties systematically varies across these different economies. It finds that job seekers looking for work in the United States, whether they are culturally American or Israeli, are much more likely than job seekers in Israel to use weak ties. Moreover, this article shows that whether or not job seekers attempt to use weak ties to find a job depends on how institutional contexts shape their understandings of labor markets and the motivations of weak ties and employers. The mechanisms Granovetter (1974/1995) describes in explaining the use of weak ties in the United States are not universal but vary with job seekers’ understandings of the workings of the hiring process.

Three-Way Comparison: Americans, Israelis, and Israelis in the United States

To compare the use of social ties to find jobs across institutional contexts, this article examines the job search practices of three groups of unemployed white-collar workers. The first group, whom I will refer to as Americans, are job seekers who are looking for work in the San Francisco and Boston areas and who have lived in the United States for at least 10 years. The second group, whom I will refer to as Israelis, are job seekers looking for work in the Tel Aviv area and who have lived in Israel for at least 10 years. The third group, whom I will refer to as Israelis in the United States, are job seekers who are looking for work in the Boston area and who have arrived in the United States from Israel less than one year before the interview. By including in the sample Israelis looking for work in the United States and comparing them with Americans looking in the United States and Israelis looking in Israel, this article is able to move the analysis of the activation of weak ties beyond internalized cultural norms of individualism or collectivism (Ma et al., 2011; Xiao & Tsui, 2007) and to instead focus on the effects of institutional contexts.

Although Israel and the United States have significant differences, such as their respective economic sizes (which will be discussed later), the comparison of white-collar job seekers in the San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and Boston areas is particularly interesting because of a number of important similarities across these metropolitan areas. All three cities rank among the most important high-tech, biotech, and start-up hubs in the world (e.g., Rosenberg & Vainunska, 2007).¹ For example, a recent industry analysis ranks Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Boston first, second, and sixth, respectively, in the world for start-ups.² Beyond these industry-level similarities, over the past 30 years white-collar workers in both Israel and the United States have experienced a sharp rise in job insecurity (Kalleberg, 2009, 2011; Ram, 2008; Samuel & Harpaz, 2004) due to labor-market deregulation in Israel and changing corporate practices in the United States that have made layoffs of white-collar workers routine in both countries (Mishel, Bernstein, & Allegretto, 2007; Osterman, 1999; Samuel & Harpaz, 2004).³ Finally, on becoming unemployed, workers in both countries face similar regimes of unemployment insurance (Gal, 2005; Gangl, 2004; Hipp, 2011). Given these similarities, we may expect similar job-searching practices and efforts to activate weak ties.

To explore the activation of weak ties in the course of job searching, I conducted in-depth interviews with 84 Americans from the San Francisco and Boston areas, 48 Israelis from the Tel Aviv area, and 20 Israelis searching for work in the Boston area.⁴ Each interview lasted between 90 min and 3 hours. The interviews were semistructured and asked open-ended questions about job search experiences and strategies. A portion of each interview asked job seekers to describe any attempts they had made to activate social networks. I limited my interviews to unemployed job seekers⁵ in the middle years of their working lives, between the ages of 25 and 65. To facilitate comparability, I also limited my interviews to white-collar workers looking for work in the private sector. General occupational categories were also kept comparable across sites, with roughly similar proportions of managers, technical workers, professionals, and other white-collar workers.⁶ Table 1 summarizes the basic demographic characteristics of the interviewees.

Table 1.

Sample Demographics.

Job seekers	Americans in San Francisco and Boston areas	Israelis in Tel Aviv area	Israelis in Boston area
Number of interviewees	84	48	20
Percent men	54	58	30
Age (median)	46	43	31
Percent married	45	56	80
Over one year unemployed (%)	40	36	n/a
Race/ethnicity (%)
White	79
African American	9
Hispanic	3
Asian American and other	9
Jewish European descent	n/a	48	60
Jewish Middle Eastern descent	n/a	28	20
Jewish Other	n/a	24	20

Approximately half of both the American job seekers in Boston and San Francisco and the Israeli job seekers in Tel Aviv were recruited at support groups for white-collar job seekers.⁷ Another 40% of these interviewees were recruited by randomly approaching individuals at government unemployment offices and job fairs. Finally, 10% were recruited by snowballing. In addition to interviews, I observed support groups for white-collar job seekers—one in the San Francisco Bay area, which I will refer to as AmeriSupport, and one in the Tel Aviv area, which I will refer to as IsraSupport.

Regarding the Israeli job seekers in Boston, 60% were recruited at workshops aimed at helping recently arrived Israelis look for work and 40% were recruited by snowballing. It is important to note that more than half of these Boston-based Israeli job seekers were spouses of postdoctoral scholars at one of the Boston-area universities. Thus, unlike typical immigrants who self-select to seek work in the United States, these job seekers share only a willingness to accommodate their partners’ careers. My interview data for this group of job seekers were supplemented by observations of the workshops supporting newly arriving Israelis in Boston.

Comparing Networking Practices in the United States and Israel

My interview data reveal that job seekers in the United States and Israel have sharply diverging understandings and practices regarding the use of ties. Job seekers in the United States place at the center of their job search the activation of all ties, strong and weak, as well as the cultivation of new ties—a form of tie not addressed by Granovetter (1974/1995) but which, as discussed later, is pursued by American job seekers with the same logic as the activation of weak ties. In contrast, job seekers in Israel turn only to strong ties—close friends and relatives—for help in their job search and do so only after they have exhausted other search methods.

Nearly all the American white-collar job seekers whom I interviewed believed that networking was critical to finding work, and most made strenuous efforts both to network with existing strong and weak ties and to generate new ones. The day-to-day networking practices of American white-collar job seekers are primarily aimed at weak ties or the creation of new ties because job seekers typically turn to their strong ties at the start of their search and quickly exhaust job leads arising from this relatively small pool of ties. David, an American high-tech manager, explained the conventional wisdom: “The way you will get a job is through people that you know.” To get to know more people, he uses online social networks and attends conferences and networking events put on by high-tech companies. He points to a flash disk that he wears around his neck and proclaims: “I have 5,000 contacts right here!” Frank, likewise, explained his focus on networking: “How do I look for work? Networking is the best way. When someone gets the idea to hire someone, they first ask their friends.” Many American job seekers I interviewed used the same expression, explaining that to find work you need “to put yourself out there.” The intense focus of American white-collar job seekers on rekindling old ties and cultivating new ties is found by all recent studies of white-collar job searching in the United States (e.g., Ehrenreich, 2005; Lane, 2011; Sharone, 2013b; Smith, 2001).

While Granovetter (1974/1995) found implausible the idea that efforts to cultivate new contacts would be effective,⁸ American job seekers who regularly attend conferences and networking events hoping to make new contacts clearly believe that this is effective, as do university career offices, professional associations, and state-run one-stop centers, which routinely organize such networking events (Ehrenreich, 2005; Lane, 2011; Smith, 2001). Given the centrality of these practices to contemporary white-collar job searching in the United States, this article will explore both job seeker practices that are aimed at generating new ties, as would be the case at networking events (Lane, 2011), as well as activating a preexisting weak tie, such as a former colleague. Indeed, given Granovetter’s (1973, 1974/1995) previously discussed theory of the motivations of referrers of weak ties to enhance their reputations as people who “know how to get things done,” it appears reasonable to expect that efforts to create new ties may be as effective as cases documented by Granovetter, where job seekers contacted weak ties with whom they had not spoken for 20 years (p. 55).

In contrast to job seekers in the United States, job seekers in Israel seek help only from well-established strong ties and do not attempt to mobilize weak ties or expand their existing networks. Strikingly, I did not find a single exception to this pattern in Israel. Israelis who were job searching in the Boston area (even in the very town where Granovetter (1973, 1974/1995) conducted his research nearly 40 years ago) and who had previously searched for work in Israel most clearly articulated the different approaches to weak ties by drawing on their firsthand experiences with both types of networking practices. For example, in contrast to Don’s current networking practice in the Boston area, which is focused on identifying weak ties at potential employers, during his most recent search in Israel, he chose not to reach out to an acquaintance working at a company where he interviewed. He reflected: “In my last job in Israel, when I interviewed, I knew someone at the company but I did not contact him. In the United States, I would have contacted him.”

Dorit, an Israeli manager looking for work in Boston, also takes a different approach to using social ties in the United States than she did in Israel. She noted the differences with respect to trying to create new contacts through introductions:

Networking here does not look at all like in Israel … Here there is the practice of “introduction”—people introduce each other very easily. In Israel, this is not done … There is no concept of “introduction.” In Israel, they help if they are a close friend, but someone not close will not help.

Israeli job seekers, when looking for work in Israel, dismissed the idea of attempting to create new ties. Eldad, a marketer, told me: “Personal connections are important,” but he added, “if they don’t know you, forget it.” Or as Don put it: “In Israel, [networking] is not active. Personal contacts may help, but it is not contacts that were formed during the job search.” The characterization of Israeli networking as not active also points to the fact that, unlike job seekers in the United States, job seekers in Israel make no effort to reconnect with old colleagues or to identify friends of friends who may know a hiring manager at a targeted employer.

Hila, an Israeli career coach who guides Israelis looking for work in Boston, put the difference this way:

In Israel, we do not say that a worker brings a friend but that a friend brings a friend. The basis [for a referral] is ultimately social in Israel. You will not refer someone you do not socially know. People will only help those to whom they are socially close.

The social basis for help in Israel rules out the use of the most common weak ties activated by white-collar American job seekers—former work colleagues whom they never saw outside the work context (Granovetter, 1973).

One clear indication of the difference between the Israeli and American practices of networking with weak or new ties is seen with respect to the prevalence of so-called networking events. Gatherings set up for job seekers to meet and network are ubiquitous in the United States, and most American job seekers I interviewed reported attending such events. A recent study of high-tech job seekers in the Dallas area reports dozens of weekly networking events in that city alone (Lane, 2011). By contrast, there are no networking events in Israel. In fact, most Israeli job seekers had a hard time understanding my question about networking events because they had never heard of such events. Those who understood the question typically had experience working in both the United States and Israel. For example, Jamie, who had worked in both countries, explained that “in Israel, there’s no formal networking” but rather “it’s seen as a friend thing and there are no networking events or structures of any sort.”

Liat, an Israeli currently looking for work in Boston as a radio producer, never attended a networking event while in Israel but has begun to regularly attend such events when looking for work in the United States. She explained the difference:

In Israel, I never heard of an event where people go and introduce themselves. Here, you need to go to a place and mingle and actually give your cards. In Israel, the only time you see a business card is from real estate agents. So networking is totally different. In Israel, networking happens if my friend hears of a job opening and they pass along my résumé. There is no physical meeting. There are no gatherings.

The ubiquity of networking events in the United States reflects an unspoken assumption that newly created ties or weak ties can be helpful in one’s job search, while their utter absence in Israel reflects the opposite assumption about the futility of attempting to receive help from any such contacts.

To further explore the different approaches to the use of weak ties in Israel and the United States, it is illuminating to compare the use of online social networks. In both Israel and the United States, online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, have grown rapidly in recent years. Yet, in contrast to the rapid rise in the use of online social networking among job seekers in the United States to reconnect with old contacts—or to connect with their contacts’ contacts—Israeli job seekers generally do not use online social networks as part of their job search.

In the United States, job seekers report how social networking sites have facilitated connecting. As Terry puts it: “It’s easier, it’s convenient. You can do it 24 hours. It’s pretty effortless. It’s just simpler.” Helen reports:

I use social networking to connect with people that I’ve worked with that have gone in different ways. There’s a tremendous amount of people that I know of that had gone in different ways. If you’ve lost touch, you can look them up.

Social networking sites are also used by American job seekers to create new ties through introductions. For example, Paul discovered that “a friend of a former roommate of mine who I know very well” was working at a company where Paul himself was seeking employment. He asked the former roommate for an introduction.⁹

Job seekers in Israel, in contrast, do not turn to online social networking in their search. This is not a reflection of a general lack of use of social media. Israelis, in fact, use online social networks even more extensively than Americans.¹⁰ However, they do not use them for job searching. Israelis who are familiar with how LinkedIn is used in both the United States and Israel were best positioned to explain the difference. As Masha put it: “Israelis use LinkedIn, but not like they do in the United States. They might use it for more social purposes, like to talk to friends. I think it’s more for communication.”

Israelis’ use of online social networks changes, however, when they look for work in the United States. Yaron, an Israeli currently searching for work in Boston, changed his use of LinkedIn following the practice of American white-collar job seekers:

Yaron: [As part my search] I created a LinkedIn group of Israelis I met in Boston.

OS: The use of social media is different here from Israel?

Yaron: Yes. The group I created here I would not have created in Israel. Here, on LinkedIn I am friends with lots of people that I don’t really know. In Israel I knew them all.

Similarly, Ari explained his changed use of social networking sites in the United States:

I added many people to my LinkedIn here that previously I didn’t add. In Israel that was less important to me. In Israel no one relies on LinkedIn in hiring … Here LinkedIn is very important. I now connect with many people that I met in Israel that moved to the United States.

Israelis in Boston explained their change of practices in the use of LinkedIn matter-of-factly. Nirit reported that in Israel social networking tools like LinkedIn “are not highly useful,” adding that in Israel, “networking is done in other ways.” When I probed about these other ways, the most common response was that help is sought from family members and close friends, who often date back to the army days, the period of mandatory military service that most Israelis go through in their late teens and early twenties. Ronny explained that he is “getting a lot of emails for networking” but, as he put it, “it’s not because I’m on LinkedIn.” Rather, his networking emails mostly come from friends from his former army unit.

The patterns in the activation of weak ties and the use of online social networks in job searching discussed earlier are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2.

Diverging Practices.

Job seekers	Americans in San Francisco and Boston areas	Israelis in Tel Aviv area	Israelis in Boston area
Activate weak ties	86%	0%	75%
Use online social network in job search	71%	0%	60%

Explaining the Divergence in the Activation of Weak Ties

What explains this cross-national divergence in job-searching practices? What are the conditions that lead job seekers in the United States to pursue weak and new ties while job seekers in Israel focus only on strong ties? Before exploring and theorizing the role of specific labor market institutions, I consider the plausibility of two alternative explanations rooted in broader contextual factors. First, a salient difference among the sites is their respective sizes. For example, the San Francisco metropolitan area, home to over seven million people, is more than double the size of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area with its approximately three million residents (Bay Area Census, 2012; Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, 2009, Table 2.16). Does the smaller size of Tel Aviv contribute to the predominance of strong ties simply because job seekers are more likely to know each other? Although size may play some role in job seekers’ networking practices, it is not a sufficient explanation. Many of the Israeli job seekers I interviewed had no relevant close ties and nevertheless did not consider the possibility of activating weak ties. In fact, there is no verb to network in Hebrew; one’s network is one’s network. Uri, one of the most energetic Israeli job seekers I met, described his personal network as fixed:

I don’t have good friends or family that can help. Some people don’t have appropriate connections. What can you do? People around me are blue-collar and don’t know high-level people. That’s the situation.

This widely shared view suggests that Israelis refrain from reaching out to weak ties even when they lack helpful strong ties. On the flipside, the practices of white-collar Americans in reaching out to weak ties has been documented in locations smaller than the Tel Aviv metropolitan area—such as the Sacramento metropolitan area in California (Smith, 2001)—suggesting again that the size of the local economy is not sufficient to explain the activation of weak ties.

A second broad contextual difference that may be considered important concerns predominant cultural norms. As previously discussed, one strand of the existing literature focuses on cultural explanations by drawing on Hofstede (2001) and theorizing that cross-national variations arise from deeply internalized norms and assumptions regarding the self in relation to others along the dimension of individualism–collectivism (Ma et al., 2011; Xiao & Tsui, 2007). This argument claims that collectivist cultures correspond to distrust of weak ties who are not members of one’s in group (Ma et al., 2011; Xiao & Tsui, 2007). Applied to this study, it may be suggested that Israelis’ exclusive reliance on strong ties reflects a collectivist culture.

Hofstede’s (2001) view on the relationship between cultures and action has been challenged by sociologists of culture who generally do not view national cultures as coherent and deeply internalized systems but as complex and contradictory; instead of providing particular worldviews, cultures are more often seen as offering a variety of tools that actors use in different contexts (Swidler, 1986). The findings in this article support Swidler’s (1986) toolkit understanding of culture. Even if modern Israel can be characterized as having a collectivist culture, which is a matter of debate beyond the scope of this article, the findings reported in the prior section—most pointedly, the data discussed with respect to Israeli job seekers who are currently looking for work in the Boston area—show the implausibility of a deeply internalized cultural explanation for cross-national differences in networking practices. If deeply internalized cultural forces were at play, we would expect Israelis who have recently arrived to the United States to maintain a collectivist orientation and to be reluctant to engage in the American style of networking with weak and new ties. We would also expect that this reluctance would be particularly strong when interacting with other Israelis because such interactions occur in Hebrew and generally follow Israeli cultural norms. Yet, the data described in the prior section show the striking matter-of-factness with which Israelis adapt their networking patterns once in the United States. While in Israel, job seekers turn only to strong ties; once in America, they shift gears and turn to weak ties, both Americans and fellow Israelis. Israelis’ rapid adoption of American practices of reaching out to weak ties when looking for work in Boston suggests that networking practices are not reflections of deeply internalized cultural norms.

To account for the different strategic approaches toward the use of weak ties, I begin by considering the explanations offered by Israeli job seekers in Boston who pursue weak ties in the United States but did not in Israel. Mor, an Israeli job seeker in Boston, expressed the reasons behind her different approach to weak ties in the United States in a way that mirrors most other Israelis in Boston:

The use of contacts in Israel does not look so good. Here it is very accepted. In Israel, it was hard to pick up the phone and ask for a favor. To call someone you do not know well—it just would not happen. But here it is very accepted. In Israel you are asking for a favor. You can’t call someone that you don’t know and say X referred me and maybe you can help me. Here it feels comfortable. Here it’s okay. It’s understood that this is done. In Israel, I would not have done it. I would have not felt comfortable.

Mor’s explanation of her use of weak ties in the United States does not allude to an increase in trust of people outside her in group, as would be suggested by a cultural argument focusing on individualism versus collectivism. Rather, Mor’s explanation of her changed approach to weak ties focuses on the different levels of imposition she experiences herself as making on the would-be referrer and the extent to which she feels uncomfortable at burdening the potential referrer by asking for a favor.

Because contacting a tie in Israel is understood as asking for a favor, Audrey—like all other Israeli job seekers I interviewed—relies on only close friends and family. She explains that because contacting a tie is asking for a favor, “for contacts to help you … requires some kind of mutual obligation, something from the past.” In the United States, no such past relationship is necessary because in the United States, as Mor put it, “it’s understood that it’s done.”

What underlies this difference? Why does it feel comfortable to call a weak tie in the United States but not in Israel? Mor’s description of the differences in using weak ties in each context provides a crucial clue. In the remainder of this article, I will unpack the reasons underlying Mor’s observation that while in the United States reaching out to weak ties is “very accepted,” in Israel turning to weak ties “does not look so good” and is akin to asking for a favor.

A first step to explaining this difference requires looking at job seekers’ perceptions of what it takes to get a job in each country. As prior research has shown (Sharone, 2013a, 2013b), Israeli job seekers consistently discuss getting a job as the process of finding an employer looking for their mix of skills, experiences, and credentials—or, as several put it, their specs. As Chanan, an Israeli software engineer, explains: “You have to be able to look good on paper [and] fit the keywords” that the employer is looking for. By contrast, white-collar American job seekers view skills and credentials as only one—and not necessarily the most important—factor in hiring. Jason, an American software engineer, succinctly expressed the widely held American view: “The most important thing is fit, not skill. People want to work with people that they like.” These different job seeker understandings of what it takes to find a job—which I will refer to as a focus on specs in Israel and on chemistry in the United States—reflect how hiring institutions in each site render different dimensions of the applicant-filtering process more salient to each group of job seekers.¹¹

The specs-focused understanding of the hiring process in Israel is likely rooted in the practices of the dominant screening institutions that job seekers encounter: private staffing agencies and preemployment testing institutes. In Israel, staffing agencies typically post ads, receive and filter stacks of résumés, and conduct initial screening interviews on behalf of employers (Nadiv, 2005; Ram, 2008). Every Israeli job seeker I interviewed reported dealing with staffing agencies in his or her search. Job seekers’ most salient experiences with staffing agencies are short screening interviews conducted by screeners who use an unbending checklist of credentials, skills, and experiences specified by the client-employer (Sharone, 2013a). The Israeli hiring process also typically involves a daylong examination at a preemployment testing institute (Fizer, 2003). Ninety-one percent of the Israeli job seekers I interviewed reported taking preemployment tests as part of their job search. A typical day of testing combines an examination of writing, math, and logic skills with exercises that aim to measure an applicant’s ability to cooperate, communicate, and lead (Sharone, 2013a).

In contrast, the focus of American job seekers on the role of interpersonal chemistry and fit in the hiring process likely stems from hiring practices that make salient to American job seekers the importance of rapport; most significantly, the interviewing practices of hiring managers. In the United States, after an initial behind-the-scenes filtering of résumés by computer programs and human resources personnel, the most common approach to hiring is a direct interview by the hiring manager. Prior research shows that in interviews conducted by hiring managers in the United States, much weight is given to interpersonal fit and rapport (Finlay & Coverdill, 2002; Huo, Huang, & Napier, 2002; Rivera, 2012). As the remainder of this article will show, job seekers’ different perceptions of how the hiring process works underlie their diverging practices in activating weak ties.

The Activation of Weak Ties in the American Context

The focus of American white-collar job seekers in the United States on developing and using social ties to act as intermediaries between themselves and potential employers—whether such ties are strong, weak, or brand new—is best understood within the broader institutional context that makes salient to job seekers the importance of interpersonal fit and chemistry to the hiring process. My data reveal, consistent with the existing literature (Ehrenreich, 2005; Lane, 2011; Smith, 2001), that American white-collar job seekers who seek guidance on job searching are repeatedly told in books and workshops that the single most important element of the job search is networking. AmeriSupport’s director would often repeat the mantra: “Network, network, network. Eighty percent of new jobs are found through your personal network.”

The consistent rationale offered for this advice is that hiring managers prefer to hire through referrals because these provide critical information on intangible qualities of the candidate that are not apparent from a paper résumé. The logic is straightforward. Because fit is understood as the key to getting hired and because the best way to convey fit is through a personal referral, finding referrals becomes the central focus of job searching in the United States.

In the American context, a referrer’s willingness and ability to make a referral is not perceived to require a long-standing or close relationship. In fact, referrals are widely presumed to be obtainable from anyone, whether a preexisting weak tie in Granovetter’s (1974) sense, with whom one has not been in touch with for 20 years, or a newly formed tie made at a professional association meeting. The key to getting a referral is generating a sense of interpersonal connection, which conveys having the right intangible qualities to be a good fit. An AmeriSupport speaker provided job seekers with advice on how to create an immediate connection with someone they had just met at a professional association meeting:

Start by saying, “Sure is a big crowd.” … [Then] you say, “I am Mary. I am an accountant. Well, I was until last week when they laid us all off and sent the jobs to India.” Notice what I did here. I was very quickly revealing of my need without appearing desperate. That sets the stage for developing the quick connection. Then say, “Tell me about you.” [She might respond:] “Oh, I am a marketing manager.” But she says it in a flat tone. Part of how you create deep connection instantly is that you listen not to the words but to what’s beneath the words. [Respond] in a tactful way: “Gee, you sound thrilled with that.” She gets a little defensive. “Oh no, it’s okay. It’s just that with my three kids, my plate is pretty full.” Aha. You found out her hot button from her animated voice. This is really important. You make an empathetic statement like: “I can understand. How old are your kids?” You share parallel experiences. You show empathy. When you sense she is feeling somewhat connected to you, make the ask: “As I mentioned, I am looking for my next accounting job. Might you know somebody I can speak with?” If she knows someone, she is fairly likely to tell you even though you just met.¹²

Job seeker support organizations like AmeriSupport devote a great deal of time to training job seekers to hone their elevator speech or the 30-second me (Lane, 2011; Smith, 2001) to help their members create an interpersonal connection with networking partners. A good elevator speech is not a recitation of dry facts about oneself, but a communication that will have emotional resonance. Job seekers are reminded that, just like car commercials, the emphasis of the elevator speech should not be on the details of the engine specs. To connect requires that job seekers focus not mainly on the content of their words but rather on their tone and body language.

New members of AmeriSupport devote several hours in their initial week to developing an elevator speech. The most common mistake new members make is to create an elevator speech that sounds formulaic. Career coaches, who come to AmeriSupport as guest speakers, therefore focus their feedback on urging job seekers to be more connecting in their elevator speeches. As one guest speaker told the job seeker group:

To be honest, when I listened to the people who introduced themselves here, I was unhappy. They were stiff and sterile. It’s all about chemistry and connection. If you look like a professional job seeker, it looks like you have been looking for a job too long. Don’t do the script with your name stated twice. Stop the scripting. You will look like a loser. Speak your truth informally. Make a connection.

The same focus on creating an interpersonal connection when networking in person also pervades advice on creating one’s online social networking profile. One AmeriSupport guest speaker explained: “The way to generate chemistry is to tell me about yourself. Tell me your brand, the kind of person you are. It’s a way to decide if they like you.”

Most American job seekers dislike networking precisely because the goal of networking—to create interpersonal connection—generates a vulnerability to personalized rejection if the networking effort is not successful (Sharone, 2013b). Online social networking platforms such as LinkedIn are appealing because they promise a way to connect that is much less personally vulnerable. Ultimately, however, most job seekers find that online social networks may be a useful way to identify potential contacts but do not produce enough of a personal connection to generate a referral and therefore cannot substitute for face-to-face meetings. As James, a job seeker, explains:

[Online social networking] can be useful … But if you allow it to be the sole form of networking—trolling LinkedIn all day has somewhat limited value. It doesn’t give you the ability to establish meaningful relationships. People won’t recommend you to a hiring manager simply because you met on LinkedIn. But if you reach out to them, have coffee with them, establish a good rapport, have similarities, that’s when the person says, “You know what? A certain division within our firm has space. Let me get you in touch with a hiring manager.”

The need to create a connection when reaching out to weak ties is the main limitation job seekers in the United States perceive in using social networking sites as a job search tool. As Paul explains: “LinkedIn is easy,” but if one only connects online, then one’s contacts “don’t know anything about you in terms of what your personality is like. Would you be a good fit for the company?” Paul therefore, like James, believes the need to use social networking platforms like LinkedIn to make the initial contact and then set up in-person meetings for coffee or lunch.

Because the end goal of networking in the American context is to produce a connection that will lead to a referral, networking is also one of the most difficult aspects of American white-collar job searching. Connection requires self-revealing communication that will generate a sense of meaningful commonalities. Job seekers typically feel uncomfortable about revealing themselves to strangers. Marsha, for example, reported great hesitation about networking because “I will mess up and people will think I am a dork.” It is important to note how the hesitation expressed by Marsha, which stems from the fear of rejection, is different from the previously described Israeli hesitation to contact weak ties, which is rooted in a fear of imposing or of asking a favor of the referrer. The different subjective sources of job seeker discomfort with networking—a fear of rejection in the United States and a fear of imposing on others in Israel—are revealing of different underlying assumptions about the workings of the labor market in each site.

Compared with Israeli job seekers, American job seekers are less concerned about imposing on others. The issue of imposing on others is less salient in the American white-collar context because networking is understood as potentially beneficial not only to the job seeker but also to the referrer and employer. This is because (a) American employers are presumed to be concerned about fit, (b) referrals are widely recognized as the most direct and efficient way to convey fit, and therefore (c) potential referrers are presumed to welcome the opportunity to facilitate a successful match. This understanding, which is at the core of Granovetter’s (1974/1995) theory of the motivation of weak ties to make referrals, allows the practice of networking with weak ties to be the center of job searching in the United States. The shared presumption is that employers value information about “the fit between individual personalities and the ‘personality’ of the job and organization” (Granovetter, 1974/1995, p. 132), and therefore if a referral works out, the referrer is likely to “find their reputation enhanced” (p. 55). As previously discussed, this presumption fits well with dominant understandings of hiring in the American white-collar labor market. As the following section will show, in the Israeli context this presumption is not shared, making the use of weak ties an implausible job search strategy.

The Activation of Weak Ties in the Israeli Context

Although the use of ties to find a job is understood as an efficient way to convey one’s fit in the American context, in the Israeli context it is understood as a deviation from the ordinary channels for conveying one’s skills and credentials. As Mor, who was earlier quoted, put it: “The use of contacts in Israel does not look so good.”

The use of ties does not look so good in Israel because it is in tension with the dominant understanding that hiring is about objective skills, an understanding that is discursively and practically reinforced by the dominant Israel hiring institutions—staffing agencies and testing centers. The Israeli objective-skills discourse is, in fact, typically articulated and clarified through a contrast to what many Israeli job seekers call the old paradigm of using contacts to pull strings. In the Israeli context, the use of contacts is typically depicted as a throwback to an old and corrupt premodern era. The Hebrew word for activating ties, protectzia, comes from the Russian word meaning protection—that is, protection from the rigid hiring system and its bureaucratic institutions. It implies getting something because of influence exerted on your behalf as a special favor. Protectzia and the activation of ties—because they introduce emphatically personal and nonprofessional factors—are thus diametrically opposed to an understanding of the hiring process as depending on objective factors. Put simply, the use of personal contacts is understood as a corruption of the system through favoritism.

While the use of protectzia is depicted as a deviation from the proper and legitimate path to employment, most job seekers in Israel nonetheless report that personal connections play an important role in their search. Israeli job seekers who have difficulty finding work often come to see the practices of the staffing agencies and testing institutes as arbitrary. Feeling shut out of the labor market by rigid checklists and tests, they come to see the use of protectzia as a necessary evil. In contrast to the American job search support organizations, where networking is central and much time is spent honing elevator speeches, job seekers at IsraSupport remind each other that, in addition to engaging in their standard job-searching activities, they should also use contacts. As Avi, a job seeker, put it, “remember to also use the ‘grandma’ method, the old way of using contacts and protectzia.”

It is widely assumed that a referral from a close personal connection inside a company can allow one to bypass staffing agency screenings and preemployment testing. Nonetheless, when job seekers talk of using contacts, it is done with either a wink, indicating satisfaction with beating the system, or a sigh, suggesting humiliation at being compelled to engage in ethically questionable practices.

The ironic distance job seekers exhibit about using social ties to find a job is revealed by the tongue-in-cheek way some Israelis refer to using close ties as taking vitamin P, with the P standing for protectzia. As Michal put it, “you take vitamin P when you look for work where your cousin works or in the business your old army commander now runs.”

In interviewing Israeli job seekers, I asked whether they had considered using the networking strategies of American job seekers—turning to weak ties or attempting to develop new ties by approaching strangers at professional conferences. This question typically generated confusion. Audrey, a young lawyer, replied to my question with one of her own: “Why would they refer me if they don’t really know me? I would not refer someone that I don’t know.” As previously discussed, Audrey and other Israeli job seekers in Israel turn to only close friends and family in their job search because they understand the use of ties as imposing a significant burden on the intermediary. Given this assumed burden, it follows that contacts will help only when some mutual obligation from the past exists. The assumed burden on the would-be referrer is rooted in the dominant Israeli understanding of the hiring process in which a referrer must pull strings on behalf of the job seeker and expend capital within his or her organization. This, in turn, is understood to necessitate the preexistence of an ongoing long-term relationship of reciprocal exchanges. In other words, it requires a strong tie.

This difference is not a reflection of a deeply held cultural belief or of collectivist distrust of the out group, as shown by the ready use of weak ties by Israelis looking for work in Boston. Rather, it is grounded in the understanding of how hiring works in a particular context. Don, the Israeli job seeker in Boston who was earlier quoted saying that when he last searched for a job in Israel, he had an acquaintance in the company where he interviewed but did not contact him—while if the interview had been in the United States, he would have contacted this acquaintance—explained that the difference in his use of contacts in each place stems from his understanding that in the United States, developing a personal relationship and rapport with the hiring manager is important. Don elaborated: “Here [in the United States], networking is very important. You have to work much on personal contacts, to get to know the hiring managers [through such contacts], and to present yourself to them.” Whereas in Israel, contacts are used to obtain favors, in the United States, as Don explains, contacts are used to facilitate a more personal connection.

The different assumptions underlying the use of contacts—most importantly, the different presumptions regarding contacts’ potential motivations—are even reflected in the mistakes that Israelis in Boston make when attempting to activate weak ties. Their rapid adoption of the American practice of reaching out to weak ties does not automatically come with an adoption of the American way of reaching out. Liraz, an Israeli looking for work in Boston, was surprised to learn that when reaching out to weak ties, it is helpful to meet in person for coffee and not simply make a request for a referral by phone. He explained that in Israel, “there is no need to meet for coffee. Just pick up the phone and ask. This is a favor.” Hila, the Israeli career coach who helps Israelis looking for work in Boston, explains that while Israelis rapidly adjust to the practice of contacting weak ties, they are much slower to learn the social protocols involved in making such a contact. The difficult cultural adjustment is not in reaching out to weak ties but in knowing how to reach out. As Hila puts it: “Israelis just call. There is no tango. No foreplay. No building a relationship.” The absence of tango stems from the adoption of American weak-tie activation practices without an understanding of the different way the American white-collar labor market actually works; most crucially, the motivations of referrers in the American context where referrals are not understood as requests for a favor but as a match that may benefit all parties involved.

Discussion: Labor-Market Institutions and the Activation of Weak Ties

In-depth interviews with job seekers and participant observations at job search support organizations reveal a sharp cross-national divergence in job seekers’ activation of weak ties. Job seekers in Israel exclusively focus on their strong ties, whereas job seekers in the United States, whether culturally American or Israeli, put weak ties at the center of their job search strategies. How do we explain this divergence?

This article suggests that these different strategies are rooted in different job seeker understandings of the workings of the labor market, which arise in different institutional contexts. In the American white-collar institutional context, where employers are perceived to value information about fit and intangible personal characteristics and where the use of ties is understood as an efficient way to convey fit, job seekers reaching out to weak ties perceive a potential outcome that benefits not only themselves but also the weak tie and his or her employer. In the Israeli institutional context, using personal connections is understood as a corruption of the job search process. Because the referring intermediary is asking the employer to make an exception to the usual hiring process based on objective skills, the hiring of a referral involves a chain of linked favors.

First, by deviating from its bureaucratized filtering-and-testing hiring process, an Israeli employer is granting a favor to the referring employee. (In the same way, a study of British and German firms found that hiring an employee’s referral is treated as the provision of a “fringe benefit” to the referrer; Wood, 1985, p. 111.) This is a favor because the deviation from the standard hiring process exacts a cost on the organization by setting an undesirable precedent and a cost on the hiring manager for violating organizational norms and expectations.

Second, because the hiring of a referral is a favor granted by the employer to the referrer, the referral itself is also a favor from the referrer to the referred job seeker. In this case, the favor is the expenditure of whatever goodwill or political capital is necessary for the referrer to make the referral to the employer.¹³ For this reason, Israeli job seekers reasonably presume the need for a strong tie with a past history of mutual and reciprocal obligations. In short, because in the Israeli context the use of connections to exert influence imposes a high cost on the intermediary, American-style networking focused on weak or new ties is perceived as impractical and is therefore not practiced in Israel.

The Israeli chain-of-favors dynamic stands in sharp contrast to the American context, where the person acting as the intermediary is not asking the hiring manager for a favor but assumes the role of a helpful matchmaker bringing together two suitable parties for their mutual benefit. Since networking is understood in the American context as a legitimate and efficient practice, there is far less cost and risk to acting as an intermediary. In the context of a hiring system with a significant focus on interpersonal fit or chemistry, making a referral entails only convincing the decision maker that one has relevant information about a potential candidate’s fit. While a chain of favors is required for referrals to be effective in the Israeli context, an American hiring manager is often grateful to the intermediary for providing relevant information. In fact, as Granovetter (1974/1995) recognized, in the American context weak ties are motivated to make referrals precisely because of this potential benefit of enhancing their reputations as contributors to the employer. Granovetter’s understanding of the reputational benefits to successful referrers is based on the widely shared premise in the American white-collar labor market that referrers are making a valuable contribution to employers by providing important but difficult-to-obtain information about candidates’ intangible qualities and likely fit with the employer. As Granovetter (1974/1995) explains, unlike quantifiable information, “some kinds of data cannot be numerically reproduced … the best examples involve the fit between individual personalities and the ‘personality’ of the job and organization” (p. 132).

Making a referral is never risk-free. In both the American and the Israeli contexts, the referrer bears some reputational risk in making the referral (Marin, 2012; Smith, 2005, 2007) because referring an employee who does not perform can damage the reputation of the referrer. But the risks of a mismatch, which are common to both countries, need to be distinguished from the risks and costs of proposing a match in the first place. In Israel—but not in the United States—even if the match is ultimately successful, the referrer incurs costs in making the referral because he or she is necessarily asking the hiring manager to deviate from the standard hiring process.

Conclusion

Returning to the question posed at the start of this article regarding whether and how institutional contexts encourage or inhibit the activation of weak ties, this article shows that different institutional contexts generate different job seeker understandings of the hiring process, which in turn can make the activation of weak ties the central focus of the job search, as is the case in the United States, or can make such ties largely irrelevant, as is the case in Israel.

There are significant implications to the finding of this article that the activation of weak ties is not an inherent feature of advanced white-collar labor markets but instead a contingent outcome of particular institutional arrangements. For example, a growing literature reveals that when hiring outcomes depend on job seekers possessing broad networks, the results exacerbate gender and racial inequalities (for a recent review, see Trimble & Kmec, 2011). If the strength of weak ties is not inherent to advanced market economies but a feature of the American white-collar institutional context, then these unequal outcomes can be addressed at their root through public policies and institutional reforms. Regarding future research, the findings of this article suggest that to understand the use of different forms of social capital requires careful examination of how institutional contexts shape actors’ understandings of the meaning of activating a referral. As Granovetter (1974/1995) has taught a generation of economic sociologists, actors are embedded in institutions and “job searching behavior is more than a rational economic process—it is heavily embedded in other social processes that closely constrain and determine its course and results” (p. 39). Further research is needed to explore the range of institutional contexts that generate variations in the activation of weak ties and the social processes that underlie such variations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Roberto Fernandez, Mathew Bidwell, Peter Cappelli, Emilio Castilla, Ana Villalobos, Sandra Smith, and the anonymous reviewers of Work and Occupations for their feedback and support on this manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Ofer Sharone is an assistant professor of Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan. Sharone’s research focuses on career transitions and unemployment. His recently published book, Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences (University of Chicago Press), compares the experiences of job seekers in Israel and the United States.

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