This study investigates mechanisms of tie formation in an inter-organizational network generated by the mobility of employees between organizations. We argue that information exchanges across organizations are contingent on the direction of prior employees' movements. We also assess the locality of information exchanges leading to tie formation and renewal. We analyze a data set that contains information on all organizations in the Stockholm metropolitan between 1990 and 2003. The findings highlight the importance of tie direction and the relevance of mid-range network structures in research on network dynamics and knowledge exchanges stemming from the mobility of employees across organizations.
The segregation of labor markets along ethnic and gender lines is socially highly consequential, and the social science literature has long viewed homophily and network-based job recruitments as some of its most crucial drivers. Here, we focus on a previously unidentified mechanism, the Trojan-horse mechanism, which, in contradiction to the main tenet of previous research, suggests that network-based recruitment reduce rather than increase segregation levels. We identify the conditions under which networks are desegregating, and using unique data on all individuals and all workplaces located in the Stockholm region during the years 2000–2017, we find strong empirical evidence for the Trojan-horse mechanism and its role in the gender segregation of labor markets.
In this study, we reconsider the classical positive association between the level of market uncertainty and an organization's propensity to form ties with organizations of similar status. Although prior research argues that the greater the uncertainty, the higher the level of status homophily, we suggest that this relationship is contingent upon framing that affects positive or negative valence towards uncertainty. In an up market, organizations tend to frame uncertainty as upside risk, and thus will subsequently favour explorative uncertainty‐mitigation devices; whereas, in a down market, organizations primarily frame uncertainty as downward risk, and thus will rely on more conservative uncertainty‐mitigation mechanisms. We therefore predict that a greater number of status‐heterophilous ties will be formed in an up market than in a down market. We discuss the implications of our results for status theory and more broadly for research on strategic decision making under uncertainty.
In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political‐cultural approach, I argue that this concept can be a source of fresh insights into empirical problems. I find that the greater the change in the social environment, the more salient the benefits of using habitus as a tool to analyze agents' behavior.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.