Careers through Complex Networks - NetCareers (NetCareers)

Abstract:

The NetCareers project asks: what characterizes the careers of individuals that rose from the bottom to the top? Theoretically and methodologically, Net- Careers will break new ground in pushing for a more dynamic and complex understanding of social mobility. New administrative data allow us to track population cohorts through their entire school and workplace careers. The challenge is to make sense of the mobility of entire population cohorts through complex career networks. Over the last two decades the fields of computer science, physics, and complexity studies have become increasingly interested in complex network models, leading to multiple scientific breakthroughs. But, we are yet to learn how these models reveal protracted social mobility processes at the time-scale of life courses and generations. Using massive data sets on mobility careers from several countries, the project assembles an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the sciences and social sciences to model the complex network dynamics of social mobility.