Family Impact on Job Search by Chinese College Graduates from Provincial Cities: Based on Interview Research with College Graduates from S County, Jiangsu Province

In this paper, we regard the college students’ transition from school to work as a part of the transition to adulthood. It is the graduate students from Chinese provincial cities that we take into consideration. We discuss the family impact on job search of these college graduates in terms of two aspects: ( 1 ) The impact on the employment determination from the graduates’ parents’ preferences regarding work location and property; ( 2 ) The impact from the functionalities of the family and network of relatives. The results show that, since China has introduced market economy reform against the background of remaining a communist system with strong familism, college graduates’ employment process is still limited by structural and institutional factors, such as the household registration system and labor market segmentation. College graduates and their parents have begun to make use of personal connections and network of relatives for acquiring better employment opportunities and fulfilling better future expectations. The efficiency of the impact of this family and relative network is influenced by its distribution range. The current status of college graduates’ employment, which can be termed a “family strategy,” is considered as both a resource (positive effect) and a limitation (negative effect). According to the analytical results of this paper, by regarding the college students’ transition from school to work as a part of the transition to adulthood, when discussing the societal structure college students are embedded in, we can break through the constraints of the college student employment market and social network, which have been mentioned in existing related papers, and thus enable a more comprehensive discussion.