Titles and org charts show who formally holds power, but not always who actually has influence or access to the connections that open doors. In this conversation, professor Lasse Folke Henriksen, who has mapped social networks across the Danish labour market using register data, explores how people are connected to one another.
His research finds that former colleagues are among the most important routes to a new job, and that a contact is especially valuable when it sits within a dense network of shared acquaintances around the employing workplace. Advantages can also be passed down, with sons of managers benefiting particularly from their fathers' networks. Interviewed on stage by editor Mette Holbæk, Henriksen will ask what becomes visible when we look at the relationships behind official titles, and what the debate on inequality overlooks when networking is treated as a skill each individual should simply get better at.
The evening is the inaugural professorial lecture from Henriksen, now a professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen after many years at CBS. It is part of the series Verden forsøgt forklaret, a conversation series on the issues that shape our shared world, held in the intimate stage setting of the historic University Library in Fiolstræde.
