Written as three publishable papers, this dissertation examines the sources of several forms of social capital in Singapore, and the effects of social capital on occupational success.
Using representative survey data from Singapore, these papers make several important theoretical contributions:
The first paper examines how and why categorical forms of stratification such as gender and ethnicity tend to produce distinctive forms of network inequalities: for example, whereas Chinese (relative to Malays and Indians) tend to have greater access to well-educated, wealthy, Chinese and weak tie social capital (but not non-kin), men (relative to women) tend to have greater access to men, non-kin and weak ties (but not well-educated, wealthy and Chinese). The key to understanding such distinctive patterns of network inequalities (by gender and ethnicity) is to understand the distinctive ways in which gender and ethnic groups are distributed in routine organizations such as schools, paid work and voluntary associations.
The second paper examines the significance of personal contacts in job searches, in the context of Singapore’s meritocratic system. I show that in certain sectors such as the state bureaucracy, social networking brings no distinct advantages as appointments are made exclusively on the basis of the credentials of the candidates. Thus, personal contacts are not always useful, especially in labour markets that rely heavily on the signalling role of academic credentials to match people to jobs. In contrast, personal contacts are more useful among less qualified job searches in the private sector.
The third paper shows that while job contacts (i.e. ‘mobilized’ social capital) may not always pay off in meritocratic labour markets, ‘accessed’ social capital remains extremely important. The leveraging power of social capital in meritocratic markets is not the active mobilization of job contacts per se, but more subtly, the result of embedded social resources such as knowing many university graduates and wealthy people.
Together, these papers illustrate how socio-structural factors such as meritocracy, gender and racialization form important predictors of the distribution, role and value of social capital in everyday life and labour markets.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/26353 |
| Date | 23 February 2011 |
| Creators | Chua, Vincent Kynn Hong |
| Contributors | Erickson, Bonnie |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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