Career mobility and job flocking

Flocking is oftentimes used to metaphorically describe social behavior. Do people actually flock in a way that avian species do? This paper develops a purely ecological mechanism for explaining similarity in human behavior by distinguishing between social networks of person-to-person ties and ecological networks of ties of observability. I test the “information center hypothesis” [Ibis 115 (1973) 517] from bioecology on the career mobility of professional managers who all graduated from the same university. In this case, spatial proximity in birds is replaced with sociodemographic homophily on an acquired status characteristic among persons. The results indicate that homophilous individuals exchange information about a favorable destination state by ecological ties of observability, that is, they follow the career mobility of fellow alumni and “flock” along with them.