What Do You Know, Who Do You Know?: School as a Site for the Production of Social Capital and its Effects on Income Attainment in Poland and the Czech Republic

I Introduction IN THIS PAPER WE CRITIQUE TRADITIONAL APPROACHES to stratification, which suggest that education contributes to inequality solely by endowing people with different amounts of human capital (i.e., knowledge and skills) or credentials. What these approaches overlook is the social component of education--friends, acquaintances and other connections one accumulates while in school. We investigate how personal networks, conceived as a source of social capital, created during the schooling process impact occupational success. They serve as a channel through which applicants gain information about jobs and employers acquire information regarding applicants. II Review of the Literature THE MAJORITY OF STATUS ATTAINMNET AND HUMAN CAPITAL THEORISTS believe that education contributes to stratification because it provides people with skills and knowledge that are used in the marketplace to attain better-paying jobs (Becker 1975; Mincer 1974; Blau and Duncan 1967; Jencks et al. 1972; Featherman and Hauser 1978). Signaling theorists, on the other hand, maintain that education is instrumental in determining one's life chances because it functions as a credential that employers use to screen job applicants (Arrow 1973; Spence 1973; Blaug 1985). Despite their differences, both paradigms conceive of schooling as the process by which atomized individuals acquire knowledge or credentials. Such a vision of schooling can be compared to a mass production factory in which children and young adults, isolated from one another, enter the processing machine on conveyer belts, where they are injected with knowledge and skills or stamped with credentials at the end of the line. This traditional, atomized view of education exaggerates the explanatory power attributed to human capital and credentials and ignores the role that social capital created during the schooling process plays in distributing societal rewards. When scholars report the effect of education on occupational success, human capital is not the only thing being measured, as it is assumed. Rather, the benefits of social capital gained during the schooling process confound the effect. We believe that education contributes to the system of stratification not only because it provides individuals with knowledge, skills and credentials that are used to gain leverage in the job market, but also because it creates networks of connections that both individuals and their prospective employers can draw upon in order to find each other. School-based networks are especially important for occupational success because they are more tailored to one's occupational interests and aspirations than are friendships made through church or neighborhood organizations. In addition, they are indirectly helpful as individuals gain access to new professional networks through previously established school-based networks. Since these networks are a product of the structure of relationships between people, and since they facilitate social actions, they are a potential generator of what has become generally termed social capital (Coleman 1990). Social capital can be conceptualized as either a public or a private good (Putnam 2000:20-21; Portes 1998; Coleman 1990). Public good applications of social capital focus on how generalized norms, which are bounded to a specific geographical area, make particular forms of social action possible. In this conceptualization, places, not people, posses this social capital, although individuals can take advantage of it (Putnam 1993; Woolcock 1998; Coleman 1990). Because it is a public good, those that utilize this form of social capital may not be the same people that invest in its growth. In this paper we treat social capital as a private good--an asset that individuals possess as a result of their taking part in a set of social relationships or a group (Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1990; Schiff 1992; Burt 1992). …