Disability and employment: considering the importance of social capital

Journal of Rehabilitation, July-Sept, 2005 by Blyden Potts

Granovetter (1974) distinguishes so-called "weak" ties, links to "distant" persons known from work or other social contexts, from strong ties to family, friends, or relatives. He shows that the so-called "weak" ties are often better at linking persons to jobs. Any one strong tie may be more likely to provide what information they have, but "weak" ties tend to be less redundant, reach people farther away--both geographically and socially--and are--more prevalent, thus offer access to more job opportunities. This is the strength of weak ties.

Intuitively it is preferable to have job contacts with connections to job opportunities in the lines of work that one seeks. Researchers also suggest that contacts with more prestige may provide better access to higher prestige jobs (Lai, Lin & Leung, 1998: Beggs & Hurlbert, 1997: Boxman, De Graaf & Flap, 1991; De Graaf & Flap, 1988; Lin & Dumin, 1986; Lin, Ensel & Vaughn, 1981), although this effect does not appear to generalize to other job attributes, such as income, autonomy, or firm size (Marsden & Hurlbert, 1988).

Though it can be done, actively contacting one's network in search of a job opportunity can be time consuming, may give the undesirable impression that the person is desperate for work, and may put off job contacts who in some instances may feel being asked is an imposition or inappropriate. The ideal network is one where job contacts will think of the job seeker when they bear of a suitable opportunity without being asked. Granovetter found that persons who got jobs via networks were often not actively seeking work at the time. The job found them through the network rather than them finding the job. For white collar jobs like those in Granovetter's study, it is often employers who initiate contact with the potential employee rather than the employee who initiates contact (Granovetter 1974).

Social Networks and Disability

Surprisingly, the research on social capital and employment seems to have received little attention among those concerned with the employment of persons with disabilities. There is a tradition of identifying family, friends, and coworkers as potential sources of "natural" social support for workers with a disability (e.g. Hagner, Butterworth & Keith, 1995), or less often as potential employment contacts, but the concept of social capital as a key to employment has been largely ignored by those assisting persons with disabilities to find employment.

Social capital could be a significant factor in explaining the employment problems of persons with disabilities if (1) differences in job contact networks affect the chances of employment for persons with a disability in the same way they do for persons without a disability, and (2) the job contact networks of persons with a disability tend to be at a disadvantage relative to those of the general population. That job contacts should affect access to employment opportunities for persons with disability in the same way that they do for the general population seems quite plausible though it could be that some disabilities might pose such substantial obstacles to employment that social networks matter little, or not at all. It is also possible that networks might be more important for persons with a disability than for the general population. If disability narrows the set of jobs one is qualified to fill, then having the right channels of job contacts to get access to that smaller set of job opportunities may be even more crucial to employment success.