Vacancy Chain - Process

Process

Vacancy chains are started when an initial vacancy enters a population, such as when a new house is built, a new car is manufactured, or a new job is created. It can also begin when an existing unit is vacated by someone leaving the system under consideration, such as an employee retiring, or a home owner goes to a nursing home.

Eventually a chain will come to an end, usually with a new entrant into the system or when the last unit in a chain is abandoned, merged, or destroyed. This can involve a new employee recruit or a housing unit on market for the first time, or when a house in the chain is torn down, left empty, or the duties of a vacant job are distributed among other employees. A vacancy chain is simply the sequence of moves that a vacancy makes from initial entry into a system to final termination. The distribution of material resources and social positions through vacancy chain processes requires that the things distributed possess a number of abstract qualities. These qualities include that the resource units in question are reusable, discrete, identifiable, and utilized by one individual or social group at a time.

Further, in vacancy chain mobility systems, a unit must be vacant before it can be taken by a new occupant; individuals must need or want new and usually bigger or better units from time to time; vacant units must be scarce (the number is small compared to the number of individuals who want them); and most individuals in a group already must have units so they can leave one behind when they move to a new one.

In order to trace a vacancy chain, a researcher notes a vacancy coming into a system and then follows this vacancy as it moves to a number of resource units in turn and then finally leaves the system. Since vacancy chains in humans often take considerable periods of time, on the order of months, to move from beginning to end and because the chains often involve people widely scattered geographically, researchers usually trace the chains by reconstructing them from organizational records or from series of linked interviews.

The length of a vacancy chain is the number of moves a vacancy makes after its entrance into a system, and this includes the terminal move to the absorbing state. Longer chains and more costly resource units generate greater benefits,while shorter chains and less costly units generate smaller benefits, for the individuals and institutions involved. Vacancy chains have patterned effects upon other individuals and, in the human case, institutions connected to the primary individuals actually getting resources in the chains.