The role of social networks in contemporary careers

Individuals are embedded in networks of personal and professional relationships that confer resources that help drive career success. Our goal for this chapter is to provide the methodological foundations and synthesize new perspectives for understanding the impact of social networks on career outcomes in the current career context. First, we present a network primer with fundamentals about social network research designs, data, and constructs. Next, we overview three foundational network theories that are traditionally applied to careers. Then, we introduce a framework of social network constructs that can be used to better understand the link between social networks and career outcomes, including those that emerged from the changing nature of work. Our framework presents a combination of relational features-network composition, configuration, and content-and relational levels of analysis-individual, dyadic, and network levels-that organize a breadth of network constructs and spotlight contemporary areas that could benefit from greater attention. Last, we identify future directions for scholars interested in exploring careers through a social network lens.