It would be another four years before the paper made it into print.9 But Granovetter had the last laugh. Many experts consider the concept of ‘weak ties’ one of the most insightful ever to arise in sociology, and, now as a venerable professor at Stanford, Granovetter is laden with honorary degrees.
He had the idea of contrasting the effectiveness of ‘strong ties’–those with close friends and family–with ‘weak ties’, that is, more casual, sporadic, unplanned and fleeting contacts. His central insight–that weak ties or links are often much more valuable than strong ties–was initially puzzling. Granovetter said that the people with whom we spend little time can frequently be far more useful to us than those we see every day, those with whom we have intimate and intense relationships, those who actively try to help us. He also argued that weak ties between acquaintances or strangers are more important to society than the strong ties of friendship. How could this be?
Put simply, his argument is as follows. Our close friends tend to be similar to us and mainly move in the same social circles. Close friends operate in a dense network, what Granovetter called a ‘closely knit clump of social structure’, where most people know each other and share the same information. The individual also has a range of acquaintances, few of whom know each other. Each acquaintance is enmeshed in a clump of friends who share information. The weak tie between the individual and his acquaintance ‘therefore, becomes not merely a trivial acquaintance tie but rather a crucial bridge between the two densely knit clumps of close friends…It follows, then, that individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends.’10
If information is to move from one group to another that is far away, either socially or physically, then the only way is through bridges– links between two different people, two different worlds, links that, by definition, are weak rather than strong. As Granovetter wrote in his original paper, ‘this means that whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger number of people, and traverse greater social distance, when passed through weak ties rather than strong’11. If weak links are removed–the bridges, as it were, are blown up–then this would harm the spread of information more than if strong links were dissolved. If the bridges did not exist, new ideas would be stunted or spread slowly, science would be handicapped, and social divisions would be perpetuated.
To get useful new ideas or information, we must go beyond our immediate circle and make contact with distant parts of the social system. The only way to do that is through weak ties, and in particular weak ties that ‘bridge’ the gap between one hub and another.
The essence of Granovetter’s insight is the value of socially diverse links, between people who don’t know each other well. If you think about it for a few minutes, the theory becomes unanswerable. If weak links did not exist, we would still be living in small tribes like our ancient ancestors, totally cut off from one another, and with only a few close family members and neighbours to help us eke out our miserable existence. Weak links connect otherwise isolated hubs or individuals, creating a tissue of interconnections which bind together society.
Granovetter then looked at something that interests almost everyone–how to get a job. He asked managers, technicians and other professionals who had changed jobs recently how they had heard about their new positions. It turned out that personal contacts were paramount in connecting people with jobs. More jobs were found in this way than through direct formal application, and the best jobs–those enjoying and commanding the most pay and prestige–generally came through personal contacts.12 Job-seekers using weak links were also much less likely to have been unemployed between jobs.
We might expect friends and family to be more important than casual acquaintances in helping us secure a better job, but we would likely be wrong. Granovetter learned that only one in six of the networkers found their job through family or friends; the rest utilised acquaintances–current or former work contacts–whom they met only occasionally or rarely.
Granovetter was particularly struck by the fact that more than a quarter of all jobs were secured through contacts who were hardly ever seen:
In many cases, the contact was only marginally included in the current network of contacts, such as an old college friend or a former workmate or employer, with whom sporadic contact had been maintained. Usually such ties had not even been very strong when first forged. For work-related ties, respondents almost invariably said that they never saw the person in a non-work context. Chance meetings or mutual friends operated to reactivate such ties. It is remarkable that people receive crucial information from individuals whose very existence they have forgotten.
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How can this be, when family and friends are so much easier to use and have a greater motivation to help the job-seeker? Granovetter explains the apparent paradox in terms of the superior information available to distant contacts: acquaintances may move in different circles and therefore have job information that we do not possess. The best way to get a new job is when you are not looking for one, but stumble across it through a distant acquaintance, someone from a different world. Granovetter says our chance of making a major occupational change–jumping from one job world to another–is roughly proportional to the number of contacts we have in different worlds.
He quotes the example of ‘David M’, who became manager of the food concession at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ ballpark, worked his way through a local college, went into marketing, and after a few years opened a restaurant on the Massachusetts North Shore. Five years later, a customer noticed David M’s name on the liquor licence over the entrance, and asked if he was the same David he’d been at college with twenty-seven years before; they had known each other by sight, but had not been close. They got talking, and thereafter the friend often came back to dine there. He was in charge of a big, privately run social welfare programme in the state, and thought that David M could run one of his schemes, retraining handicapped workers, despite David’s lack of any qualifications or experience in that field. After several months of discussions, David accepted the job, in which he subsequently performed strongly.
It seems that, for finding a job and for other ways of gaining satisfaction in life, the more networks we can tap, even very loosely, the more likely we are to get what we want. And sometimes the network, unlikely as it may seem, lies right under our nose.
Elon and Kimbal Musk, two would-be entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, were ready to roll after they set up Zip2, a Web technology company. ‘We had a good story, a good product, a good team. Everything was in place,’ Kimbal said. There was just one small hitch–they couldn’t raise any money. None of the venture capitalists they approached were interested.
OK, they said to each other, if venture capitalists can’t see it, we’ll try to raise money from angel investors–wealthy private individuals. Surely they could find a computer enthusiast to put up the cash. But after months of trying, they got nowhere. They were about to give up when their landlady asked if something was wrong. The boys explained their predicament, expecting no more than tea and sympathy.
But the landlady gave them something better. She introduced them to a rich friend, who agreed to invest. It was enough to get the business going. However, months later, they were still chasing venture capitalists for proper funding. No dice.