Sieci i kapitał społeczny we wchodzeniu na rynek pracy

The results of previous studies confirm the high use of social capital as a search for work method on the Polish labour market (Labour Force Survey CSO various years). Also Bartosz Sławecki in his book „Zatrudnianie po znajomości. Kapitał społeczny na rynku pracy” [“Employment by connections. Social capital at the labour market”] identifies the main reasons behind the use of the social capital in the recruitment process, nevertheless he focuses only on the employers’ perspective. Yet, in the literature there were no discussions on the individual level differences in the social capital and their impact on labour market outcomes when social capital is mobilized at the moment of the school-to-work transitions and as Nan Lin (2001) suggests the use of the social resources embedded in our networks could determine our purposive actions as i.e. searching for a job. Additionally the analysis of the already existing data leads to ambiguous results which however may be caused due to the fact that different definitions of social capital has been used in those studies and also in the variation between terminology used in those research related to the understanding of first job as a work carried for at least 3 moths vs. any kind of work. In my PhD research project I focused on the impact of the variation in the social capital level on the outcomes at the moment of the labour market introduction observed on the individual level. The results are based on the panel data study of the total of 500 graduates from general, technical and vocational secondary schools who finished their educations in the year 2010/2011 in two locations in Poland (Kozienice or Sedziszow Malopolski). In the first wave research tools position and resource generators have been used to collect the information on social capital of graduates. In the second wave, that took place 18th months after the first one, the respondents were interviewed and the data on their labour market careers and job search methods has been collected. The results have shown that individuals with higher level of social capital less frequently used internet and newspapers adds as a job search method. Next to the traditional social capital indicators as upper reachability, resource heterogeneity, extensity of networks positions and average accessed prestige, the individual level of social capital was estimated with the application of Mokken scaling and additionally also both dichotomous and polytomous Item Response Theory models were applied. However, the level of social capital had no statistically significant impact on the length of unemployment.