Labor market, intermediation and social networking

1. Looking for work: Labor institutions and social networks - comparing metropolitan dynamics.

Intense transformations are taking place in the labor markets of major cities across the world, and new forms of occupation and unemployment are coming about. Current arguments try to infer a set of immediate effects caused by such transformations, both in terms of living and working conditions, as well as public policies.

While not ignoring the existence of such effects, this project actually runs countercurrent, and analyzes the mechanisms by which market dynamics pursue a different approach, by analyzing the mechanisms through which the dynamics of the market become socially embedded in our institutions, social behavior and subjective representations, refusing to yield to economic reason, and yet playing a decisive role in explaining it. To this end we reflect on the different forms of extra-economic embeddedness to which the relationship between the agents involved in the job hunting process in large labor markets are subject. These are: those seeking work, businesses that recruit workers, and agents that intermediate labor supply and demand (job and temporary employment agencies).

The study will be focus both on the mechanisms set in motion by those seeking work (within the context of intense occupational transition and recurring unemployment), as well as the mechanisms activated by employers (within a context of transformation in terms of headcount and job function, and new regulations governing labor relations).

Two different mechanisms to get out of unemployment (from the point of view of the worker), or to recruit labor (from the point of view of business) will be analyzed: (i) institutional mechanisms such as private, union and government job agencies; (ii) mechanisms that are not institutionalized in the system and that can explain how the players - those seeking work and those seeking labor - activate social networks, starting with their own social space (family, home or professional).

Coordinator: Nadya Araújo Guimarães

Research team: Flavia Luciane Consoni, Gisela Lobo Baptista Pereira Tartuce, Murillo Marschner Alves de Brito, Priscila Pereira Faria Vieira, Mônica Varasquim Pedro, Paulo Henrique da Silva, Felipe Monteiro, Jonas Tomazi Bicev, Milena Estorniolo, Monise Fernandes Picanço, Nathália Coelho Leobas

See the last research report, by clicking here (portuguese content only).