Granovetter on weak ties
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
The argument starts small, with three people. If A is close to B and close to C, then B and C will very probably come to know each other: they share A's time, and are likely to be alike. Granovetter treats the alternative, two strong ties with no link between their far ends, as close to impossible. From that one assumption a large result follows. A bridge, a tie that is the only path between two groups, can almost never be a strong one. Strong ties close into triangles. So whatever crosses from one cluster to another crosses on a weak tie.
That makes acquaintances structurally important, which was not the fashion in 1973. Your close friends know each other and know what you know. The person you see twice a year moves in rooms you are never in.
His evidence is a study of how professional and technical workers in a Boston suburb heard about the jobs they took. Those who heard through a person mostly heard through someone they saw occasionally or rarely. He extends the idea to communities: a neighbourhood made of tight cliques with no bridges between them cannot organise itself.
✨KEY IDEAS
If two people both have strong ties to a third, a tie between them is nearly certain.
Therefore no strong tie is a bridge, and all bridges are weak ties.
Job information came more often through contacts seen rarely than through close friends.
Removing a weak tie can do more damage to the flow of information than removing a strong one.
A community of cohesive cliques can be too fragmented to act together.
🕸️CONNECTIONS
🔗LINKED FROM
📝READING NOTES
Paraphrase, not quotation. American Journal of Sociology, 1973. Read 9 and 10 August, in the first week of the promotion project.
Why now
📂 Promotion case for Group Product Manager needs sponsors, and the calibration is a room I will not be in. The question I could not answer was plain: who at Halden knows what I do, outside the people I sit with?
The idea in my own words
- Tie strength, for him, is a mix of time spent, intensity, confiding and favours exchanged.
- Strong ties cluster. A cluster shares its information until everyone in it holds the same set.
- New information has to come from outside, and the path in is someone only loosely attached.
- It is a claim about position. A weak tie matters because of where it leads. The weakness itself is worth nothing.
Testing it on my own map
Since the reorganisation my strong ties at work are fewer and nearly all inside one stream. Priya is on Platform now, which by this logic makes her more useful as a source than when she sat three metres away. The people who will speak in calibration mostly know me through one meeting a quarter.
Disagreements
- Carrying news is not the same as vouching. A weak tie can tell you a role exists. To argue for you in a closed room takes someone who has seen the work, and that is a strong tie or at least a warm one. The paper is about information. A promotion also needs trust.
- The job-finding data is from one suburb and one kind of worker in one decade. He says so.
- It can be read as a licence for networking, which I dislike. I prefer the plainer reading: keep the acquaintances you already have, because they are bridges whether or not you tend them.
Became 💎 Weak ties carry the news that close friends cannot, a seed for now. Concept note: 🧩 Weak ties. Leona's question at the July lunch belongs beside it, since she is someone I see a few times a year and who still knew what to ask.
Questions it left me with
- Who are my bridges out of the Operations Suite? I can name four people. That is not many for five years.
- Does the newsletter count? Two thousand people I have never met, a few of whom write back. Yusuf began as exactly that.
- What do I carry across a bridge for someone else, and when did I last do it?
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : The Strength of Weak Ties, American Journal of Sociology, 1973
- Granovetter argues that : acquaintances matter more than close friends for the spread of new information and for a community's ability to act
- by stating that : strong ties form closed triangles, so the only connections between separate groups are weak ones, and anything that travels between groups must use them