Regulating the structure of job qualifications according to the specificity of human capital. An analysis of the social capital of financial advisers in banks

Institutionalist economists have shown that the duality of company labor markets is based on the degree of specificity of human capital, which is usually said to come out of an interaction with a specific technology or way of organizing production. This analysis of banking in France establishes that regulating employment through internal and external flexibility is determined by a specificity of human capital that can arise out of interactions with a social environment, given the embeddedness in underlying social networks. By promoting internal flexibility, human resource management in banks seeks to enable financial advisers to accumulate and optimise the social capital necessary for their work. (C) 2002 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.