the tension between social capital and meritocracy by Laura Adler and Elena Ayala-Hurtado

From the beginning of our careers, we’re taught the value of social capital. Parents encourage young adult children to “ask around” about potential openings. Self-help books tell us that who you know is just as valuable as what you know. University career offices entreat students to work on “networking,” positing this as its own skill worth cultivating. What started as academic knowledge—in Mark Granovetter’s dissertation, which found that white collar workers often find their jobs through people they know informally—has become mainstream axiom: social ties provide access to information about job opening and personal relationships can influence whether you get hired by providing a referral. Whether you’re hoping to move up within your company or “job-hop” your way to a stellar salary, leveraging your social capital is key.

But as social capital has become a taken-for-granted way of understanding the world of work, our culture also clings to the idea of meritocracy. The meritocratic principle—that people deserve to be rewarded in proportion to their efforts and talents—is a deeply held belief in many countries. With roots in the Protestant Ethic, it has played a prominent role in social debates in the United States over the last century, employed by both social conservatives to justify the gains of the few and liberals to advocate for expanding access to opportunities. While recent books by social commentators have drawn attention to the shortcomings of meritocracy—both in practice and as an ideal—we have yet to coalesce around an alternative framework for understanding what makes for an equitable society.

These two prominent social beliefs—in the value of social capital and the justness of meritocracy—are fundamentally in conflict, including in the realm of the labor market. From the social capital perspective, a job-seeker should use every social connection to get the best job available, regardless of their qualifications. From the meritocratic perspective, a job-seeker should earn their own position, based on their qualifications alone. Whether social ties exert influence over the process of selecting candidates, offer a referral to boost the chances of being considered, or simply provide information about job openings, they are providing unearned benefits to the socially-connected over equally qualified—or more qualified—but less connected applicants. 

How do people navigate the tension between these conflicting imperatives in the process of looking for a job? That’s the question we take up in our paper. We explore this question in the context of Spain, which offers several advantages as a site for understanding this tension. Spain has seen extraordinary levels of unemployment, making jobs highly sought-after and hard to obtain. As the value of jobs rises, using social connections becomes both more rational for individual job-seekers and more subject to moral condemnation of others, who might be passed over for a less qualified but more connected applicant. In this context, the tension between social capital and meritocracy is especially acute, bringing it to the fore and allowing us to understand how people make sense of their own behavior. 

Based on an inductive analysis of in-depth interviews with young Spaniards, we argue that people make sense of these conflicting imperatives by drawing what we call “situational boundaries”: boundaries between legitimate situations, in which the use of social connections is deemed acceptable, and illegitimate situations, which are condemned as nepotism. Situations are characterized primarily by the actor (job-seeker), their objective (the job in question), and the behavior (the type of help provided by their connections). Where the actor is perceived to be well-matched for the objective—where the job-seeker has appropriate qualifications for the job—and where the type of help provided allows the employer to evaluate those qualifications—as in a job interview—our respondents describe the use of connections as sufficiently aligned with the tenets of meritocracy so as to be acceptable. Where any component is mismatched, however, the use of connections is likely to be condemned. In a new survey experiment, we test this theory on a broader population of Spanish respondents, conceptualizing situational boundaries as responding to a three-way interaction between job-seeker, job, and type of help provided by connections.

This argument contributes to central discourses in the sociology of culture. Contemporary approaches to culture indicate that “we have more culture than we use.” In other words, culture does not have a one-to-one relationship with behavior. It is instead conceptualized as a toolkit, which we can draw from under different circumstances. But what if we have multiple cultural tools that prescribe conflicting behavior in a given context? What if a meritocratic schema tells us to go it alone while a social capital schema tells us to leverage our networks? Or in another domain: what if a religious schema tells us to condemn abortion in general, but a social support schema tells us to help a friend in need? In cases like these, how do we act on one schema without violating the other? We propose situational boundaries are an important cultural tool for making sense of our actions and upholding a sense of self in this complicated cultural terrain.

The argument speaks more specifically to issues in the sociology of morality. Contemporary sociology of morality is focused on exploring empirical regularities in the shared understanding of right and wrong. Our analysis highlights a fundamental tension at the heart of a social consensus: we all understand that social capital is more important than ever to finding work; at the same time, meritocracy is one of the more widely embraced principles for how we ought to distribute rewards in society (although we fall far short of the meritocratic ideal). This kind of moral tension is a common feature of social life, but we have little empirical insight into how people experience and resolve this kind of predicament. We hope our research can contribute to a growing body of work that helps to explain how people make sense of a complex and often ambiguous moral world.
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In the process of developing the argument, we also touch briefly on fascinating points of connection with questions of altruism. We found that, once respondents accepted a match between job-seeker, job, and helping behavior, they actively promoted the idea of helping others find work as an laudable altruistic action. This reveals a new dimension of referrals, as not just instrumentally useful but also as socially valuable, contributing to a stronger sense of social cohesion. In this context, being able to draw boundaries facilitates the provision of altruistic social support—because we can separate “good” from “bad” referrals, we are empowered to help our friends without feeling that we are undermining our meritocratic ideals. At the same time, these findings also contribute to an understanding of the more negative side of altruism itself, showing that altruism can, knowingly or unknowingly, contribute to the maintenance of inequality. 

Lauren Adler is PhD candidate in Sociology at Harvard University. Her dissertation examines how organizations set pay for new employees, identifying organizational practices and moral narratives that produce and legitimize gender pay inequality.

Elena Ayala-Hurtado is a PhD student in sociology at Harvard University. Her research examines how individuals narrate and make sense of their lives within unstable social contexts, and particularly how individuals narrate their projections toward the future.