Helping Hands: Race, Neighborhood Context, and Reluctance in Providing Job-Finding Assistance

Abstract

In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo‐coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job‐finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race‐based job‐finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.

Race, Place, and Unsolicited Job Leads

“…Recent evidence from national survey data shows that African Americans are significantly more likely than whites to assist others with job finding in general. It is only under the specific condition of concentrated black poverty where defensive individualism emerges (Hamm and McDonald 2015). Those conditions do not match well with our broad sample of currently employed workers.…”

Race, Supervisorial Change, and Job Outcomes: Employability Resilience in NCAA Division I College Basketball Coaching

“…This discrepancy is likely explained by the known discrimination minorities face in the U.S. labor market (Wilson ; Bielby ), rather than by the reluctance of black supervisors to recommend their subordinates, as the reluctant‐contacts hypothesis seems most applicable to a specific context: high black poverty neighborhoods (Hamm and McDonald ). Given the elite nature of the men's college basketball coaching labor market, it is more likely their trumpeting carries less clout, given that a difference in means t ‐test comparing average team‐level prestige by the race of the head coach reveals blacks tend to occupy less prestigious positions ( t 237 = 2.33, p < .021, two‐tailed).…”

Anticipated Stigma and Defensive Individualism During Postincarceration Job Searching*

“…More recently scholars have suggested another mechanism to explain why social networks and social capital might not lead to job attainment among disadvantaged groups, suggesting it is not necessarily the lack of job information or influential contacts, but that these individuals do not mobilize their contacts in a way that helps them to find a job (Lin 2001). For example, studies suggest that low-wage black workers may be more hesitant to refer family or friends for jobs than their white counterparts for fear that it might hurt their own reputation or to save face with their employer (Royster 2003;Smith 2007); this finding is especially salient in black communities where there is concentrated poverty (Hamm and McDonald 2015). Moreover, through social connections, poor black job searchers become cognizant of how their joblessness is viewed by others in their social network.…”