Class ceiling in the newcomer adjustment context: A networking explanation

Workers coming from lower social class backgrounds are disadvantaged in terms of long-term career success in higher-status occupations even when they attain a high level of education and work competence, an issue known as the “class ceiling.” Research trying to explain the class ceiling has focused predominantly on discrimination and bias that workers from lower social class backgrounds might face.

I introduce a new theoretical perspective that highlights the role of workers’ social capital in explaining sources of the class ceiling. Among workers with high and comparable human capital and technical competence, social capital has been shown to be a major factor explaining differences in achievement (Bauer et al. 2007; Morrison 1993, 2002; Ng et al. 2005). This is imperative because psychological research has shown that individuals from lower social class backgrounds are more likely to experience higher social self-concerns in settings dominated by middle-class norms (e.g., Stephens et al., 2014) and prefer not to engage in political behavior (e.g., Belmi & Laurin, 2016).

Since social capital is a strong candidate for explaining the class gap, I leverage the framework on lay theories of networking (Kuwabara et al., 2018) to investigate two important mechanisms that might contribute to the gap. Specifically, I examine the role of class background in influencing lay theories about 1) social intelligence and 2) social relations that may contribute to lowered networking behavior among individuals from lower social class backgrounds. Furthermore, I investigate how cross-class interactions, interactions that “occur between individuals whose social class backgrounds differ in terms of status and representation in higher education settings” (Carey et al., 2022, p. 892), moderate the relationship between social class background and networking behavior.

Through novel theoretical work, this project aims to underscore the gap in social capital development as one of the main reasons that hold individuals from lower social class backgrounds back in modern organizations. This project also aims to uncover how having cross-class interactions can potentially improve the networking behaviors of those from lower social class backgrounds.