The Chance of Influence: A Natural Experiment on the Role of Social Capital in 
Faculty Recruitment

Godechot, Olivier

doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2016.02.002

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

The Chance of Influence: A Natural Experiment on the Role of Social Capital in Faculty Recruitment

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons104955

Godechot, Olivier
Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo), Max Planck Society;

External Resource

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2016.02.002
(Publisher version)

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

SN_46_2016_Godechot.pdf
(Any fulltext), 642KB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Godechot, O. (2016). The Chance of Influence: A Natural Experiment on the Role of Social Capital in Faculty Recruitment. Social Networks, (46), 60-75. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2016.02.002.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002A-136C-7

Abstract

The effect of social capital is often overestimated because contacts and centrality can be a consequence of success rather than its cause. Only rare randomized or natural experiments can assess the real causal effect of social capital. This paper relies on data from one such experiment: faculty recruitment at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) between 1960 and 2005, a leading French institution of higher education in the social sciences. It exploits the fact that the electoral commission, a hiring committee which produces a first ranking of applicants, is partly composed of faculty members drawn at random. It shows that when the PhD advisor is randomly drawn, it doubles the chances of an applicant of being shortlisted.