Action and Information in the Job Mobility Process: The Search Decision

Current sociological models of job mobility suppress the intervening action and information mechanisms that link structural constraints to job shifts. To remedy this, this paper joins core features of structural-mobility models to key elements of economic approaches to job change in an analysis of the employed worker's decision to search the market for a better job. The analysis highlights the complementarity of structural and action approaches by conceptualizing the forces governing the search decision in terms of the principal dimensions-opportunities and achievement gains-underlying job-mobility models. The basic framework is extended to include the quality of a worker's initial screen of a prospective job as a mechanism that promotes search. The concepts of opportunities, gains, and screen quality are then used to explain male-female differences in mobility orientations. The empirical findings both reinforce structuralist assumptions and underscore the promise of applying to the study of mobility processes the kind of action approach recently advocated by Coleman (1986).