Face-to-face social networks have been around for tens of thousands of years and have a profound impact on the way people think, feel and behave, Harvard University professor Nicholas Christakis told participants at the closing general session of MPI’s 2012 World Education Congress.

Christakis distinguished a social network from a random group of unrelated people, noting that “a network has ties, and specific ties” that enable it to function in many different ways. “A network, in addition to having the constituent individuals, also has the connections between those individuals,” and the connections fall into two categories, artificial and natural.

The simplest example of an artificial network is a bucket brigade. If 100 people are lined up in a row, they have 99 ties among them, and “the group now has properties it didn’t have before, like the ability to put out a fire,” he said. The same hundred people, organized as a phone tree in which each individual phones two others, “is now optimized for the efficient, accurate, rapid transmission of information.”

But natural social networks have a different look and a very different function. 

“To my eyes, these social networks are intricate things of beauty,” Christakis said. “They are so elaborate, so complex, and so ubiquitous that one has to wonder what purpose they serve,” how they form and how they affect the people they bring together.

Christakis and a colleague studied patterns of obesity dating to the 1970s to search for any evidence that social networks influenced individual behaviors. They concluded that weight gain or loss spreads within social systems, between spouses, siblings, friends or co-workers. The same dynamic could apply to people who attend a meeting and hear the same thing at the same time: “It can ripple through the network and affect you.”

The same applies to the spread of emotions through networks and in crowds, with people who are happy or unhappy tending to cluster together. 

“Being in the center of things, organizing things, being able to connect to other people, confers certain emotional advantages,” he said. 

--Mitchell Beer

Thinking of doing some major networking and connecting at WEC this year in hopes of getting a better job (or maybe a job)? Well, new research from North Carolina State University shows that informal social networks play an important role when it comes to finding jobs in both the U.S. and Germany, but those networks are significantly more important for high-paying jobs in the U.S.—which may contribute to economic inequality.

“It is interesting to note that the open market system in the U.S., with minimal labor regulations, actually sees people benefiting more from patronage—despite the expectation that open markets would value merit over social connections,” said Richard Benton, a Ph.D. student at N.C. State who co-authored the research.

The researchers looked at nationally representative survey data from the U.S. and Germany to compare the extent to which people find new jobs through “informal recruitment.” Informal recruitment occurs when a person who is not looking for a new job is approached with a job opportunity through social connections.

The study shows that, on average, informal recruitment is significantly more common in Germany, where approximately 40 percent of jobs are filled through informal recruitment—as opposed to approximately 27 percent of jobs in the U.S.

However, the jobs people find through informal recruitment in the U.S. are much more likely to be high-wage managerial positions. Specifically, in the U.S., the odds that a job will be filled via informal recruitment increase by two percent for every dollar of hourly wage that the job pays.

For example, the odds that jobs paying US$40 per hour ($80,000 per year) will be filled through informal recruitment are about 66 percent better than the odds that a minimum-wage job ($7.25 per hour) will be filled through informal recruitment.

By comparison, the researchers found that wages in Germany did not appear to be linked to how workers found their jobs.

“Ultimately, this suggests that U.S. economic institutions offer greater rewards to sponsorship and nepotism than what we see elsewhere, which could help to explain why inequality is so extreme here.” said Dr. Steve McDonald, an associate professor of sociology at N.C. State and lead author of the paper.

(Story materials via North Carolina State University.)