Roberto M Fernandez
Biographic Data
| ID | 150820 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Roberto M Fernandez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Roberto M |
| FAMILY NAME | Fernandez |
| SIGNATURE | FERNANDEZ R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4126-4980 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
La pobreza contemporánea: Antecedentes históricos, transformaciones y conformación de una idea
Este artículo se interesa por la aproximación a los principales antecedentes históricos y las transformaciones sociales que han influido en la comprensión y sentido de la pobreza contemporánea. Se propone un recorrido histórico –haciendo hincapié en las regiones europea, latinoamericana y africana– por aquellas coyunturas, dinámicas y perspectivas más relevantes mediante las que se han conformado las diferentes representaciones acerca de la pobre…
Gendered Job Search: An Analysis of Gender Differences in Reservation Wages and Job Applications
Using a weekly survey of unemployed workers, this study examines gender differences in reservation wages and applied-for occupational categories. The analysis shows that a large portion of the gender difference in reservation wages is attributable to the fact that women and men search for different occupations. Findings further demonstrate that women are more likely to apply to occupations with higher percentages of female incumbents, and they ta…
Los derechos en broma. Análisis, comentarios y críticas
Los derechos en broma es un libro provocador, audaz, combativo e innovador por las cuestiones que se plantea y los temas que aborda. Por esta razón, en este libro, Pablo de Lora rescata una perspectiva ‹‹tradicional›› o ‹‹clásica›› de los derechos y la legislación que, defiende, debiera de inspirar los sistemas jurídicos democráticos contemporáneos frente a lo que considera una ‹‹moralización›› de la política (y, por ende, del derecho) en el cont…
What Makes Weak Ties Strong
We raise two challenges concerning the validity of arguments underlying Granovetter's strength of weak ties (SWT) thesis: ( a) whether weak ties are actually bridges, i.e., they help reach more socially distant actors than strong ties, and ( b) whether weak ties transmit information effectively enough so that weak ties' alleged structural properties make them more useful than strong ties. In the course of reviewing subsequent research that has ma…
Natalia Velilla, Así funciona la Justicia: Verdades y mentiras en la justicia española
Este artículo reseña: Natalia Velilla, Así funciona la Justicia: Verdades y mentiras en la justicia española.(2021) Editorial Arpa, Barcelona, 318 pp
Gender Composition of Labor Queues and Gender Disparities in Hiring
Sex segregation across jobs is widespread. While numerous studies have investigated how hiring contributes to this phenomenon, scholars disagree on how the gender composition of the set of candidates that firms consider (labor queues) is related to gender disparities in hiring. Theories of gendered organizations posit that organizations will tend to disadvantage females across all jobs, including jobs where females predominate. Other theories sug…
At the Expense of Quality
Many organizations use employee referral programs to incentivize employees to refer potential applicants from their social networks. Employers frequently offer a monetary bonus to employees who refer an applicant, and this is often contingent on whether the person is then hired and retained for a given length of time. In deciding whether to refer someone, referrers face a potential role conflict, as they need to balance their motivations for help…
Supervivencias y coexistencias
Gender Sorting and the Glass Ceiling in High-Tech Firms
With few exceptions, studies have conceived of the glass ceiling as reflecting internal promotion biases. In this article, the authors argue that glass ceiling patterns can also be the result of external recruitment and hiring processes. Using data on people applying by means of the Internet for jobs at 441 small- and medium-sized high-tech firms, they find evidence that the glass ceiling is produced by both internal and external hiring processes…
Strength matters: Tie strength as a causal driver of networks' information benefits
The Strength of Weak Ties in MBA Job Search: A Within--Person Test
Jason Greenberg, Roberto M. Fernandez Sociological Science, May 18, 2016 DOI 10.15195/v3.a14 Abstract Whether and how social ties create value has inspired substantial research in organizational theory, sociology, and economics
How Do Labor Market Networks Work?
The informal seeking and sharing of job opportunity information via contacts are the dominant mechanisms for both the supply and demand sides of the labor market. Despite many decades of scholarly scrutiny, we have established little certainty about the mechanisms through which labor market networks operate. Much of this uncertainty results from single‐perspective investigations of a fundamentally triadic process. Network‐mediated job search is n…
Tipping Points: Referral Homophily and Job Segregation
Race, spatial mismatch, and job accessibility: Evidence from a plant relocation
Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process
Networks, Race, and Hiring
It is common for scholars interested in race and poverty to invoke a lack of access to job networks as one of the reasons that African Americans and Hispanics face difficulties in the labor market. Much research has found, however, that minorities do worse when they use personal networks in job finding. Research in this area has been hampered by the complicated and multi-step nature of the job-finding process and by the lack of appropriate compar…
Gendering the Job: Networks and Recruitment at a Call Center
Understanding the mechanisms driving gender segregation has become a key focus in research on gender and labor markets. While the literature often invokes gender-sorting mechanisms that operate prehire, the data used to study these processes are usually collected on posthire populations. This article examines the workings of prehire mechanisms determining job sex segregation. Analyzing unique data on the recruitment and hiring process for custome…
Space in the Study of Labor Markets
A common claim in the economic, geographic, and sociological literatures on labor markets is that space 'matters' for labor market outcomes. We review three distinct literatures that take the relationship between labor markets and geographic space as a central concern, in particular: (a) the research on race and spatial mismatch; (b) the literature on gender, space, and labor markets; and (c) the research on the spatial agglomeration of employers…
Modernidad larga, breve posmodernidad
El autor sostiene la tesis de la inclusión de la posmodernidad en un proceso inacabado, el de la modernidad. En este sentido alude una serie de discursos interpretativos y propositivos del contexto de la ciudad y acerca de la identidad del proyecto moderno-posmoderno señala las diferencias de ambos momentos de la modernidad larga
Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant Retooling
One of the most popular explanations of the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low-skill workers. Such a pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages that has been observed over the same period. Most studies of skill biased technological change use broad, supply-side data sources with only shallow data o…
Crítica ambiental y nueva agenda de gestión de las ciudades
Este ensayo se propone analizar cuatro temas relativamente encadenados: un breve análisis del desarrollo histórico de la cuestión ambiental, bajo la hipótesis genérica de su paso de una cualidad abstracta a una más espacialmente determinada, una consideración acerca del peso de lo ambiental como categorías o atributos de control externo del desarrollo socio-productivo, un comentario acerca de la crisis del planeamiento urbano tradicional en el co…
Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center
This article argues that a common organizational practice-the hiring of new workers via employee referrals-provides key insights into the notion of social capital. Employers who use such hiring methods are quintessential "social capitalists," viewing workers' social connections as resources in which they can invest in order to gain economic returns in the form of better hiring outcomes. Identified are three ways through which such returns might b…
Multiculturalismo intelectual
Sifting and Sorting: Personal Contacts and Hiring in a Retail Bank
Using unique data from a large retail bank, the authors investigate the theoretical mechanisms by which preexisting social ties affect the hiring process. By focusing on a single, large employer they are able to identify the recruitment practices and hiring criteria used during screening for entry-level positions. This method allows them to assemble data for the pool of candidates at multiple phases of the hiring process and to conduct empirical …
El gran padre tipológico
Structures of Mediation: A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks
The concept of brokerage has gained considerable attention in recent years, but few researchers have attempted to specify what the phenomenon is. In this paper, we develop a theoretical conception of brokerage behavior in social systems characterized by the exchange or flow of resources. Building on the idea that any set of actors can be partitioned in a meaningful way into a set of mutually exclusive subgroups, we show that such a partition gene…
Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center
This article argues that a common organizational practice-the hiring of new workers via employee referrals-provides key insights into the notion of social capital. Employers who use such hiring methods are quintessential "social capitalists," viewing workers' social connections as resources in which they can invest in order to gain economic returns in the form of better hiring outcomes. Identified are three ways through which such returns might b…
Sifting and Sorting: Personal Contacts and Hiring in a Retail Bank
Using unique data from a large retail bank, the authors investigate the theoretical mechanisms by which preexisting social ties affect the hiring process. By focusing on a single, large employer they are able to identify the recruitment practices and hiring criteria used during screening for entry-level positions. This method allows them to assemble data for the pool of candidates at multiple phases of the hiring process and to conduct empirical …
Networks, Race, and Hiring
It is common for scholars interested in race and poverty to invoke a lack of access to job networks as one of the reasons that African Americans and Hispanics face difficulties in the labor market. Much research has found, however, that minorities do worse when they use personal networks in job finding. Research in this area has been hampered by the complicated and multi-step nature of the job-finding process and by the lack of appropriate compar…
A Dilemma of State Power: Brokerage and Influence in the National Health Policy Domain
This article shows that occupancy of brokerage positions in the U.S. health policy domain's communication network is a crucial determinant of influence. However, the ability to convert structural position into power is contingent on the type of brokerage position occupied and whether the actor is a government organization. In the government sector, actors in representative positions are more influential to the extent that they take public stands …
Space in the Study of Labor Markets
A common claim in the economic, geographic, and sociological literatures on labor markets is that space 'matters' for labor market outcomes. We review three distinct literatures that take the relationship between labor markets and geographic space as a central concern, in particular: (a) the research on race and spatial mismatch; (b) the literature on gender, space, and labor markets; and (c) the research on the spatial agglomeration of employers…
Social networks and social movements: Multiorganizational fields and recruitment to Mississippi Freedom Summer
Gendering the Job: Networks and Recruitment at a Call Center
Understanding the mechanisms driving gender segregation has become a key focus in research on gender and labor markets. While the literature often invokes gender-sorting mechanisms that operate prehire, the data used to study these processes are usually collected on posthire populations. This article examines the workings of prehire mechanisms determining job sex segregation. Analyzing unique data on the recruitment and hiring process for custome…
Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant Retooling
One of the most popular explanations of the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low-skill workers. Such a pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages that has been observed over the same period. Most studies of skill biased technological change use broad, supply-side data sources with only shallow data o…
A Multilevel Model of Life Satisfaction: Effects of Individual Characteristics and Neighborhood Composition
The effects of individual attributes, neighborhood context, and neighborhood social comparison on self-reported life satisfaction are examinedfor a sample of United States residents. We hypothesize that neighborhoods are important social contexts within which individuals draw satisfaction from life. In the individual-level model of life satisfaction, the results agree with past research that age, education, health, and marital status affect satis…
Bilingualism and Hispanic scholastic achievement: Some baseline results
Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process
Race, Space, and Job Accessibility: Evidence from a Plant Relocation
Although recent studies have shown support for the spatial mismatch explanation of minorities' employment difficulties, key questions remain unresolved. This paper is the first report of a longitudinal study designed to shed light on this important hypothesis by studying a Milwaukee food-processing plant that is currently moving from the city's Central Business District to the suburban ring. I document the size of the impending disruption in both…
Dropping out among Hispanic youth
Gender Sorting and the Glass Ceiling in High-Tech Firms
With few exceptions, studies have conceived of the glass ceiling as reflecting internal promotion biases. In this article, the authors argue that glass ceiling patterns can also be the result of external recruitment and hiring processes. Using data on people applying by means of the Internet for jobs at 441 small- and medium-sized high-tech firms, they find evidence that the glass ceiling is produced by both internal and external hiring processes…
The Strength of Weak Ties in MBA Job Search: A Within--Person Test
Jason Greenberg, Roberto M. Fernandez Sociological Science, May 18, 2016 DOI 10.15195/v3.a14 Abstract Whether and how social ties create value has inspired substantial research in organizational theory, sociology, and economics
Race, spatial mismatch, and job accessibility: Evidence from a plant relocation
Worker Power, Firm Power, and the Structure of Labor Markets
The purpose of this article is to advance the conceptual development of structurally-oriented approaches to stratification by elaborating a behavioral model of the structure of labor markets that is based on power relations among both individual and collective actors. After reviewing the various approaches to the study of stratification and enumerating some of its shortcomings, a theory of the operation of labor markets that synthesizes a number …
What Makes Weak Ties Strong
We raise two challenges concerning the validity of arguments underlying Granovetter's strength of weak ties (SWT) thesis: ( a) whether weak ties are actually bridges, i.e., they help reach more socially distant actors than strong ties, and ( b) whether weak ties transmit information effectively enough so that weak ties' alleged structural properties make them more useful than strong ties. In the course of reviewing subsequent research that has ma…
Strength matters: Tie strength as a causal driver of networks' information benefits
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
At the Expense of Quality
Many organizations use employee referral programs to incentivize employees to refer potential applicants from their social networks. Employers frequently offer a monetary bonus to employees who refer an applicant, and this is often contingent on whether the person is then hired and retained for a given length of time. In deciding whether to refer someone, referrers face a potential role conflict, as they need to balance their motivations for help…
Structural Bases of Leadership in Intraorganizational Networks
This paper examines the relationship between leadership and formal and informal organizational structures. Focusing on dyads as the unit of analysis, we explore the effects of friendship and two kinds of formal ties on the presence or absence of leadership relations in three organizational settings
Gendered Job Search: An Analysis of Gender Differences in Reservation Wages and Job Applications
Using a weekly survey of unemployed workers, this study examines gender differences in reservation wages and applied-for occupational categories. The analysis shows that a large portion of the gender difference in reservation wages is attributable to the fact that women and men search for different occupations. Findings further demonstrate that women are more likely to apply to occupations with higher percentages of female incumbents, and they ta…
Policy Dilemmas in Urban Education: Addressing the Needs of Poor, At-Risk Children
The changing demographic face of the nation’s cities has placed tremendous burdens on urban schools. No consensus on solving the problems of urban education exists. Successful policy alternatives should be: (1) comprehensive (i.e., deal with urban problems beyond education, such as health status and poverty), (2) supported by adequate resources, (3) universal and targeted (i.e., focused on children), (4) value-based (i.e., promoting the value of …
A Multilevel Model of Life Satisfaction: Effects of Individual Characteristics and Neighborhood Composition
The effects of individual attributes, neighborhood context, and neighborhood social comparison on self-reported life satisfaction are examinedfor a sample of United States residents. We hypothesize that neighborhoods are important social contexts within which individuals draw satisfaction from life. In the individual-level model of life satisfaction, the results agree with past research that age, education, health, and marital status affect satis…
Bilingualism and Hispanic scholastic achievement: Some baseline results
Social networks and social movements: Multiorganizational fields and recruitment to Mississippi Freedom Summer
Worker Power, Firm Power, and the Structure of Labor Markets
The purpose of this article is to advance the conceptual development of structurally-oriented approaches to stratification by elaborating a behavioral model of the structure of labor markets that is based on power relations among both individual and collective actors. After reviewing the various approaches to the study of stratification and enumerating some of its shortcomings, a theory of the operation of labor markets that synthesizes a number …
Structures of Mediation: A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks
The concept of brokerage has gained considerable attention in recent years, but few researchers have attempted to specify what the phenomenon is. In this paper, we develop a theoretical conception of brokerage behavior in social systems characterized by the exchange or flow of resources. Building on the idea that any set of actors can be partitioned in a meaningful way into a set of mutually exclusive subgroups, we show that such a partition gene…
Dropping out among Hispanic youth
Structural Bases of Leadership in Intraorganizational Networks
This paper examines the relationship between leadership and formal and informal organizational structures. Focusing on dyads as the unit of analysis, we explore the effects of friendship and two kinds of formal ties on the presence or absence of leadership relations in three organizational settings
Policy Dilemmas in Urban Education: Addressing the Needs of Poor, At-Risk Children
The changing demographic face of the nation’s cities has placed tremendous burdens on urban schools. No consensus on solving the problems of urban education exists. Successful policy alternatives should be: (1) comprehensive (i.e., deal with urban problems beyond education, such as health status and poverty), (2) supported by adequate resources, (3) universal and targeted (i.e., focused on children), (4) value-based (i.e., promoting the value of …
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
Race, Space, and Job Accessibility: Evidence from a Plant Relocation
Although recent studies have shown support for the spatial mismatch explanation of minorities' employment difficulties, key questions remain unresolved. This paper is the first report of a longitudinal study designed to shed light on this important hypothesis by studying a Milwaukee food-processing plant that is currently moving from the city's Central Business District to the suburban ring. I document the size of the impending disruption in both…
A Dilemma of State Power: Brokerage and Influence in the National Health Policy Domain
This article shows that occupancy of brokerage positions in the U.S. health policy domain's communication network is a crucial determinant of influence. However, the ability to convert structural position into power is contingent on the type of brokerage position occupied and whether the actor is a government organization. In the government sector, actors in representative positions are more influential to the extent that they take public stands …
Sifting and Sorting: Personal Contacts and Hiring in a Retail Bank
Using unique data from a large retail bank, the authors investigate the theoretical mechanisms by which preexisting social ties affect the hiring process. By focusing on a single, large employer they are able to identify the recruitment practices and hiring criteria used during screening for entry-level positions. This method allows them to assemble data for the pool of candidates at multiple phases of the hiring process and to conduct empirical …
El gran padre tipológico
Multiculturalismo intelectual
Crítica ambiental y nueva agenda de gestión de las ciudades
Este ensayo se propone analizar cuatro temas relativamente encadenados: un breve análisis del desarrollo histórico de la cuestión ambiental, bajo la hipótesis genérica de su paso de una cualidad abstracta a una más espacialmente determinada, una consideración acerca del peso de lo ambiental como categorías o atributos de control externo del desarrollo socio-productivo, un comentario acerca de la crisis del planeamiento urbano tradicional en el co…
Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center
This article argues that a common organizational practice-the hiring of new workers via employee referrals-provides key insights into the notion of social capital. Employers who use such hiring methods are quintessential "social capitalists," viewing workers' social connections as resources in which they can invest in order to gain economic returns in the form of better hiring outcomes. Identified are three ways through which such returns might b…
Modernidad larga, breve posmodernidad
El autor sostiene la tesis de la inclusión de la posmodernidad en un proceso inacabado, el de la modernidad. En este sentido alude una serie de discursos interpretativos y propositivos del contexto de la ciudad y acerca de la identidad del proyecto moderno-posmoderno señala las diferencias de ambos momentos de la modernidad larga
Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant Retooling
One of the most popular explanations of the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low-skill workers. Such a pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages that has been observed over the same period. Most studies of skill biased technological change use broad, supply-side data sources with only shallow data o…
Space in the Study of Labor Markets
A common claim in the economic, geographic, and sociological literatures on labor markets is that space 'matters' for labor market outcomes. We review three distinct literatures that take the relationship between labor markets and geographic space as a central concern, in particular: (a) the research on race and spatial mismatch; (b) the literature on gender, space, and labor markets; and (c) the research on the spatial agglomeration of employers…
Gendering the Job: Networks and Recruitment at a Call Center
Understanding the mechanisms driving gender segregation has become a key focus in research on gender and labor markets. While the literature often invokes gender-sorting mechanisms that operate prehire, the data used to study these processes are usually collected on posthire populations. This article examines the workings of prehire mechanisms determining job sex segregation. Analyzing unique data on the recruitment and hiring process for custome…
Networks, Race, and Hiring
It is common for scholars interested in race and poverty to invoke a lack of access to job networks as one of the reasons that African Americans and Hispanics face difficulties in the labor market. Much research has found, however, that minorities do worse when they use personal networks in job finding. Research in this area has been hampered by the complicated and multi-step nature of the job-finding process and by the lack of appropriate compar…
Race, spatial mismatch, and job accessibility: Evidence from a plant relocation
Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process
Tipping Points: Referral Homophily and Job Segregation
How Do Labor Market Networks Work?
The informal seeking and sharing of job opportunity information via contacts are the dominant mechanisms for both the supply and demand sides of the labor market. Despite many decades of scholarly scrutiny, we have established little certainty about the mechanisms through which labor market networks operate. Much of this uncertainty results from single‐perspective investigations of a fundamentally triadic process. Network‐mediated job search is n…
Economics (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Business (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (9 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (9 works) · Labour economics (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)