Tell Me About It: Job Contacts and Information-sharing in Urban Nicaragua

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Labor Market Processes

Abstract

Sociologists have long known that job-seekers often draw upon personal contacts in their networks to find employment. While scholars examining the mobilization of contacts for employment once assumed that having contacts was synonymous with using them, more recent work has questioned that assumption and has identified factors that shape an information-holder’s willingness to share information with the contacts in their network. However, this work has focused on affluent-country contexts. There is reason to think that in poor-country contexts, where employment is scarce and insecure, and where individuals rely heavily on their networks for a range of benefits that are not forthcoming from the state, the factors that influence an information-holder’s willingness to share job information differ. This paper investigates these factors using in-depth interviews from 19 workers and job-seekers in urban Nicaragua. Further, previous work has identified several barriers to sharing job information with “weak” ties, in particular a fear of damaging one’s own reputation with a bad referral and a fear of generating awkwardness by offering unsolicited advice. This study identifies strategies that information-holders and job-seekers use to overcome these barriers, which reflect a lack of information about job-seekers.

Author

• Lindsey M. Ibanez, The Ohio State University