How Conformity to Labor Market Norms Increases Access to Job Search Assistance

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that providing job search assistance to job seekers who violate labor market norms can be costly. Consequently, people with information about jobs are less willing to help deviant job seekers. This implies that job seekers' conformity to labor market norms should be useful in predicting receipt of job search assistance. The author tests this claim using data from Japan and finds evidence that deviant job seekers receive less assistance. The findings demonstrate the importance of social norms in understanding assistance flows and illustrate the limits of network analysis in explaining access to job search assistance.

Want, Need, Fit

“…The cultural logic of defensive individualism brought into sharp relief why the provision of job-matching assistance among and between this community of Black poor residents was lacking. Hamm and McDonald’s (2015) analysis of the General Social Survey and Holbrow’s (2015) analysis of data from Japan provide further support for Smith’s (2005, 2007) central argument.…”

Employment Management Work: A Case Study and Theoretical Framework

“…A few said that they would not bother applying for a position at a business if they did not know anyone who worked there. Two people claimed that if they did not know someone at a business where they applied for a job, “They throw your application in the trash.” They talked about guarding their connections (much like the African American workers studied by Smith, 2005, and the Japanese “information holders” discussed by Holbrow, 2015) and monitoring them regularly (by phoning them, or texting them when looking for a job or if they knew they were going to need to find a job soon). People mentioned keeping track (akin to a mental rolodex) of who worked where and continually updating this information.…”

Work values in tourism: Past, present and future

“…To test the second-order conceptualisation presented in Fig. 1 (right), we analysed secondary data from the 2008 WPS, a high-quality biennial survey (Holbrow, 2015) established in 2000 by the Recruit Works Institute. The WPS provides a detail picture of the employment conditions and attitudes towards work of employees living within a 50 km radius of the Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama prefecture) (Toda, 2016).…”