Are “weak ties” really weak? Social capital reliance among second generation Turkish lawyers in Paris

The chapter studies social capital development and application among highly educated Turkish second generation working in the law sector in Paris. Previously we have demonstrated how social capital was a crucial resource in the professional pathways of Turkish second generation lawyers in Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Germany. In this chapter we take our inquiry a step further analyzing the strong and weak ties that descendants of migrants relied upon in their professional pathways. We use biographical interviews conducted with descendants of migrants in France in which they explicate their entire educational and professional trajectories. We concentrate on Turkish second generation with low-educated parents hence young people who did not receive direct professional resources from their parents. We see for this group the development of professional networks already begins in tertiary education and continues into their labour market careers. The paper aims to make contributions to several strands of the literature. Firstly, it contributes to the debate on temporality of networks by showing how distinct forms of social capital became crucial in different phases of their careers and how they relied on both weak and strong ties strategically to overcome the glass ceilings in their sectors and move upwards in their pathways. Secondly, we aim to problematize the concepts of “strong” and “weak” ties in relation to their ethnic connotations. Our study shows that second generation lawyers were able to develop relations of trust with their so-called “weak ties” while the ethnic “strong ties” represented useful clientele