By Authors: Laura Adler (Yale School of Management); Elena Ayala-Hurtado (Princeton University)
Interviewers: Junyan Lu (National University of Singapore – Strategy & Policy); Ellina Watanabe (ESADE Business School – Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability)
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392251318974
Your paper examines how job seekers navigate the tension between meritocratic and social capital logics, showing how these logics are fundamentally situated and how “situational alignment” can legitimize inequality. What initially inspired this research question? Was the project driven more by your observations in the field or by a theoretical puzzle you identified in the literature?
Elena Ayala-Hurtado: The research question emerged through a long and iterative process. We began with a question from the literature: we wanted to know how people felt about activating their social networks. Our interview questions centered on how, from whom, and under what circumstances people would accept help from their social ties. In the process of analyzing the interviews, we began to notice something very interesting: respondents often talked about how unfair it was that people were getting help from their connections during the job search. At the same time, they would describe how they and others they knew were using connections to get jobs, and how they were okay with this, at least under certain circumstances. Gradually, through memos and coding, we began to conceptualize this in terms of cultural logics. Respondents were clearly drawing on different cultural logics (social capital and meritocracy) to justify their behavior. These logics were at odds in the process of looking for a job and required some reconciliation. Much of this work was inductive. Even though we did not start out thinking about a tension between meritocracy and social capital logics, nor did I ask any specific questions about meritocracy in the interviews, we had very rich qualitative data to work with, because during the interviews I was probing for specific job seeking experiences and the respondents had a lot of time to describe their experiences and develop their thoughts. I saw some indications, particularly of respondents’ focus on meritocracy, as I conducted the interviews, but it was really when I sat down to start coding the interviews after a whirlwind fieldwork trip that the analysis started developing. It took many months to analyze the data and decide that this was the most interesting path.
Laura Adler: Yes, we started from a social capital perspective, and I remember distinctly when Elena came back from the field and did the preliminary analysis of the data, she said: “Everyone’s talking about meritocracy”—people kept talking about hiring through social networks as a violation of meritocracy. And yet they were still using their connections to find work and felt like it was fine for others to do the same. After identifying this puzzle in the initial coding, we focused on how people resolve this tension in order to act on their social capital logic in the job search, despite their commitment to the meritocratic logic.
Oftentimes, you would need to go back to the field once you’ve identified the puzzle, but in this case we were lucky: we included a number of questions asking people to describe and evaluate specific job seeking and hiring experiences, both their own and those of others. As Elena mentioned, we actually had very rich data on how people were engaging in sense-making around their use of social capital, which allowed us to do the analysis we needed.
You integrate qualitative interviews and a quantitative factorial survey experiment in a synergistic way. Could you share more about how you decided to pursue a mixed methods design? What was the process of speaking simultaneously to qualitative and quantitative reviewers like?
Laura Adler: We were always interested in mixed methods projects, but actually turning this project into a mixed methods project was something we came to over time. While we were lucky to have rich qualitative data, as we’ve mentioned, we were still left with questions about the generalizability of our concept. One option to resolve these questions would have been to return to the field with our specific model and see if the additional data we collected aligned. Another option was to use mixed methods. Our first attempt at a mixed methods design used existing survey data that approximated the key variables in our qualitative theory development. But ultimately, we realized that we could just get better traction on our model using an experimental design.
The challenge with mixed methods papers in the review process is that you have to meet the expectations of both qualitative and experimental reviewers. We were extremely lucky that all reviewers at ASQ were supportive of our mixed methods design, and we didn’t get serious misunderstandings from one side of reviewers about the other side. The reviewers were immensely helpful in sharpening our theorization; on the experimental side, they crucially raised questions that led us to expand the number of conditions in our experiment. For instance, one question was whether people evaluate the use of social capital differently for close friends and distant others, which we now explore in the paper. The editorial team was also supportive of the mixed methods approach, and the additional space required to do justice to both methods. Mixed methods research also helped sharpen our thinking. Translating our ideas across methods forced us to eliminate ambiguities and distill our concepts down to portable variables. Using mixed methods can also expand the scope of research by testing mechanisms or addressing new puzzles. That being said, there is a lot of amazing work that can be done using a single method!
“Mixed methods research also helped sharpen our thinking. Translating our ideas across methods forced us to eliminate ambiguities and distill our concepts down to portable variables.”
One of the strengths of the paper is the sensitivity with which you theorize how the logics coexist and are reconciled. How did you arrive at the concept of “situational alignment”? Could you walk us through the analytic process that led you to articulate this mechanism from the data?
Laura Adler: Our initial puzzle arising from the analysis was to bring together the social capital idea that we started with the meritocratic logic that emerged spontaneously from the interviews. As we delved into how people make sense of the tension between social capital and meritocracy in the job search, we explored many possible explanations for the circumstances within which the use of social capital was, or was not, seen as a violation of meritocracy. After months of analysis, in which Elena rigorously assessed the data along different dimensions, we felt confident that people were primarily concerned about three situational factors: the actor, the objective, and the behavior, or, in our case, the job seeker, the job, and the kind of help that was provided. So, we started to conceptualize a three-factor model. We wanted to come up with a term that encapsulated this process of trying to align these factors with one another. We eventually drew inspiration from Viviana Zelizer’s conception of relational matching. However, there were two main differences between her concept and our case. The first was captured by the term “relational.” We felt strongly that the variation we observed wasn’t explained by the relationship between the job seeker and the hiring manager, or the job seeker and the referrer, but about trying to align various situational factors, most of which were unrelated to relationships. So, we thought, maybe we can broaden the scope so it’s situational, and relationships are part of a situation. Then, we considered the term “situational matching”, but, in our conversations, Elena was absolutely right that “matching” implies starting with one component and searching for something that it matches to, which is not what we saw. Instead, what we saw was a sense-making process – do these various things align or not? We felt that “situational alignment” was the most concise way to encapsulate the social process that we observed.
Elena Ayala-Hurtado: “Aligning” was the terminology that we used casually in our conversations long before we formally decided on it. The three factors are like puzzle pieces, and they have to align for people to justify the use of social capital while preserving their commitment to meritocracy. At some point, it became clear that this was not just a metaphor, but was the core of what people were doing. The piece of our argument about how situational alignment varies when the situation involves friends versus strangers, which we developed in more detail in the experiment, came much later, as a result of reviewer feedback. I went back to the qualitative data at least a couple of years after the initial analysis to determine that this variation was extremely prevalent in the qualitative data and prepare for our updated experiment. Beyond this concept, as sociologists, we brought a lot of theoretical concepts into our paper, and the reviewers helped us streamline and foreground what was most relevant. So our theory got a lot clearer as we moved through the R&R process.
“One of my biggest pieces of advice to graduate students is to collaborate, and to collaborate with other graduate students.”
In the paper, you note that this study is part of a larger research project.Could you please walk us through the journey of this paper? How this paper fits within the larger project and how it connects to the work you conducted during your PhD?
Elena Ayala-Hurtado: Laura and I were both early-stage graduate students when we started this paper. We had a lot of interests in common, so we discussed doing a project together. I was about to go out into the field for my qualifying paper, which was about how young Spaniards navigate employment and job seeking in a context with a lot of employment precarity. Laura and I decided that this was the perfect opportunity for us to add in a separate part of the interview protocol, which would be about our shared interests. And that’s where all of the qualitative data came from. Laura and I were able to start developing this paper from there. From this qualitative paper data collection, I also have a paper in Work and Occupations about how precarious young Spaniards imagine their professional futures and the narratives that they use to project those futures. My dissertation then expanded to think about socioeconomic insecurity among young, highly educated people in both the United States and Spain. I’ve been investigating young college graduates’ experiences of insecurity, how these vary across national contexts, and various disjunctures or clashes that young graduates have to make sense of in insecure contexts, including between their expectations and their experiences of insecurity. I think that this paper similarly fits into that interest of mine: it’s also a disjuncture that people are navigating, where they’re trying to come to terms with something that doesn’t quite fit. That is a thread through a lot of my research. One of my biggest pieces of advice to graduate students is to collaborate, and to collaborate with other graduate students. I don’t think there’s any experience in graduate school where I learned more than collaborating with Laura. When we worked together, our ideas improved. And the fact that we were equal as graduate students made the process much more creative and generative. The mixed methods design also benefited from Laura’s increasing expertise in experiments from her own independent research; she was able to show me how valuable experiments could be. When it came to editing the paper, that’s also when the collaboration really shone. Streamlining is like killing your darlings. If there are two people who are equally invested and they may have different darlings, then it’s easier to navigate the streamlining process, really pinpointing what does and does not matter.
Laura Adler: It was an amazing process to go through together. Elena is an incredible qualitative researcher with a real sensitivity for what people are saying and how. I also agree with Elena that working with a collaborator is extremely helpful when it comes to streamlining your text. I think there were two things that really helped us. First, Elena and I are somewhat complementary in our styles. I tend to go for something more concise, and she tends to go for something more precise, so between those two tendencies, we balanced each other out. Second, we had a lot of trust in each other’s judgment, so if I loved something, but Elena thought we should cut it, I would trust that she was seeing something that I wasn’t. So if you can build this kind of trust with a collaborator, I think it can be really wonderful.
“Streamlining is like killing your darlings. If there are two people who are equally invested and they may have different darlings, then it’s easier to navigate the streamlining process, really pinpointing what does and does not matter.”
When we read the article, ASQ felt like a very natural home for it. Did you envision ASQ as your target journal from the beginning?
Laura Adler: When we started this paper, we were both in a sociology PhD program and initially conceptualized this being in a sociology journal. However, as we were engaging with mixed methods, we found the reception of the paper was much more enthusiastic with a management audience. And here, ASQ was our first choice – it publishes extraordinary mixed methods and inductive research. And, as you know, every paper has model papers to develop itself after, and for us, those were all ASQ papers. So, it felt like a natural fit. Initially, we weren’t sure whether the journal would be interested in something that is on the job seeker side, rather than having an organizational perspective. Later, we found they were excited about it, and we were very grateful for that.
The tensions you describe around job search and conflicting logics resonate strongly for PhD students navigating the academic job market. How do you see your findings applying to early-career scholars searching for academic positions?
Laura Adler & Elena Ayala-Hurtado: Even within academia, there is variation. Postdoc and assistant professor positions are two different markets. The structure of the jobs and the hiring process are different. First, they vary in transparency: for example, in how much the market is open to all applicants, and how much applicants need to find out through a network that there even is a position available. Assistant professor jobs are typically posted online while postdoc jobs are often shared through networks. Second, the hiring process also differs. Assistant professor hiring is much more formalized, and there usually are committees. It’s much harder to hire based on connections if you’re accountable to others on a hiring committee. Postdoc jobs are more idiosyncratic, and often the decision is made by only one professor, which affects the role of connections.
In the paper, you briefly outline avenues for future research, from prospective decision making to exploring situational factors in other domains where cultural logics may conflict. Could you elaborate on how you see this work extending into other disciplinary domains – for example, research on self-efficacy and self-perceptions in evaluating one’s situated merit? How might your findings translate to contexts beyond Europe and the US, such as Asian countries where cultural logics about work, family, and merit may differ?
Elena Ayala-Hurtado: Your question about self-efficacy and self-perceptions is extremely interesting. There are some indications in the qualitative data that this might play a role. For example, there is one respondent (Sergio) who talks about how he and his classmates from his elite master’s degree are very meritorious because of the degree that they’ve done. Beyond credentials, I think it’s interesting to think about how else people’s sense of their own situated merit might vary. We could think, for example, about how women in a traditionally male-dominated field might have less of a sense of merit, and thus feel less comfortable using connections to find jobs in this field, than men would. I think it’s an incredibly interesting route to pursue—how people think about their own situated merit. Regarding the cross-cultural question, the reason I chose Spain as my fieldsite was that Spain had a tremendous amount of unemployment and employment precarity at that time — the unemployment rate was higher than all but one OECD countries. So it seemed like an ideal place to study how young people deal with unexpected precarity for my qualifying paper. I also had the experience of living and working in Spain, so I had the contextual knowledge that allowed me to go in and be confident that I was understanding what was happening there. I think it’s very interesting to think about how these logics might vary cross-nationally. In the US, Laura and I have talked a lot about how it’s possible that networking might be seen like a type of skill or ability, and can therefore be seen as kind of merit in itself. Or recently, I have seen some data on young, unemployed college graduates in a country in Africa and how they talk about the job seeking, and I don’t think it’s the same as in the Spanish context.
Laura Adler: It’s one of the things we really hope there will be more research on. Insofar as meritocracy and social capital are cultural logics, they can vary in content across social contexts, including across national contexts. So the very meaning of meritocracy and social capital might be quite different.
Interviewer Bios:
Ellina Watanabe is a PhD candidate in Management Sciences at ESADE Business School, Universitat Ramon Llull, Spain. She engages with ethnographic and other qualitative research methods to develop a more humanized and contextualized understanding of leadership. With current leadership landscape having changed dramatically, Ellina is interested in understanding and exploring leadership and leadership development through a relational ontology lens. Specifically, moving away from heroic canons of a leader as defined by the org chart and “license” to wield influence, she is interested to conceptualize and understand leadership differently, focusing on relations and process, as well as the role of individual in relational conceptions of leadership.
Junyan Lu is a PhD candidate in Strategy and Policy at the National University of Singapore Business School. Her research focuses on corporate strategy and strategic human capital, with particular attention to acquisitions, corporate venture capital, hiring strategy, and employee mobility during technological transitions. Using a combination of large-scale archival data and qualitative methods, her work examines how organizational, social and technological contexts shape firm strategic decisions and individual career outcomes.
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