Chaînes relationnelles dans l'accès à l'emploi : perspective à partir d'une enquête récente en France
Authors: Favre Guillaume , Grossetti Michel 
Published: July 2024

Since Mark Granovetter's seminal work on the access to employment of white collars in the Boston suburbs, studies on the embeddedness of the labor market in social networks have multiplied. They all agree on the fact that a significant proportion of access to employment is based on interpersonal relations, either because these relations are decisive in ob-taining information on jobs (for future recruits) and on possible candi-dates (for recruiters), or because they lead to direct recruitment (if the recruiter and the future recruit already know each other) or because recommendations by intermediaries result in hiring. The proportion of jobs obtained on the basis of personal relationships varies according to the methods studied and the study sites but it's often a significant one. In this article, we study the relational chains of access to employment based on the questions used in a questionnaire survey carried out in 2028 on a sample of 1,676 persons living in mainland France. This sur-vey confirms previous results: relationships are important, and this im-portance varies according to the characteristics of the respondents and the jobs they obtained. Relationships are more important for executives and prestigious jobs. Moreover, these prestigious jobs were obtained by involving colleagues or former colleagues to a greater extent than other jobs. Being located in a privileged environment and knowing other peo-ple in that environment provides additional resources for accessing cer-tain jobs.In addition to verifying these trends, our aim was to characterize the chains themselves as far as possible. In this way we were able to support a hypothesis that has emerged from previous work, namely that the average length of chains varies according to the type of resource in-volved: the rarer the resource, the longer the chains. By distinguishing between assistance limited to information or advice and that which in-volves more direct help in obtaining employment, we have been able to show that the chains are longer on average in the case of direct assis-tance, which is consistent with our hypothesis, but they are also longer for the youngest people, who have not yet been able to build up profes-sional relationships comparable to those of older people. What is at stake is therefore a relative scarcity that depends on the characteristics of the persons and their network as much as on those of the resources at stake.

Depuis le travail fondateur de Mark Granovetter sur l’accès à l’emploi de cadres de la banlieue de Boston, les études sur l’encastrement du marché du travail dans les réseaux sociaux se sont multipliées. Toutes convergent sur le constat qu’une part importante des accès à l’emploi s’appuie sur des relations interpersonnelles, soit que ces relations soient décisives dans l’obtention d’informations sur les postes (pour les futures personnes recrutées) et sur les candidatures possibles (pour les personnes qui recrutent), soit qu’elles débouchent sur des recrutements directs (si les personnes concernées se connaissent déjà) ou que des recommandations par des intermédiaires aboutissent à l’embauche. La proportion des emplois obtenus sur la base de relations personnelles varie selon les méthodes étudiées et les terrains d’étude mais elle est souvent importante. Dans cet article, nous étudions les chaînes relationnelles d’accès à l’emploi à partir d’une enquête par questionnaire effectuée en 2018 au-près d’un échantillon de 1676 personnes représentatives de la population résidant en France métropolitaine. L’analyse de ces données con-firme l’importance des chaînes de relations dans l’accès à l’emploi en France, avec des variations selon les caractéristiques des personnes, les plus diplômées mobilisant les relations plus que les autres. Cette analyse porte également sur la longueur des chaînes, qui varie en fonction de la rareté relative des ressources ainsi que des caractéristiques des personnes cherchant un emploi.