Lindsey’s Notes on Granovetter

I’m posting these early in case they can be of help. If you find Granovetter’s style somewhat dense, as I do, this can serve as a reading guide. (Of course, this is no substitute for reading the article!)

Why does Granovetter pursue this line of inquiry in the first place? Because as he sees it, the web of relationships between various individual people (a social network) is the missing link between understanding individual behaviors and understanding group behaviors. If you want to make broad claims about how entire groups behave, relationships between individual members of those groups are a critical sources of information. (You can also follow this process in reverse order.)

Much of Granovetter’s article is meant to be hypothetical: it’s meant to frame sociological ideas in a manner that might lend itself to statistical or mathematical modeling. But he doesn’t actually do much of that in the article itself–he just gets the ball rolling. Rather, the article gives people new language they can use as they produce that statistical analysis.

“Ties”, or connections between individuals, can be strong, weak, or absent. Granovetter suggests that you can determine the nature of a tie by examining four qualities:

1. time
2. emotional intensity
3. intimacy, and
4. reciprocity.

For example, you probably have a strong tie to the parental figures in your life, but a weaker tie to someone you met at Outward Bound when you were a first-year student, and only saw rarely after that.

The thing about strong ties, though, is that the stronger the tie, the more likely it is that your social circles will overlap. So there’s a lot of overlap between, say, your BFF’s social network and your own.

This is why weak and absent ties take up the bulk of the article–there’s more to say about weaker connections, because they generally imply less overlap and less similarity between parties.

The first example of the work of weak/absent ties is in the “triad” model. Granovetter’s claim is that just because you’re really good friends with X, and you’re really good friends with Y, that doesn’t mean that there will be a connection between X and Y. In fact, the only time you would serve as a “bridge” to connect X and Y is if X and Y have no other BFFs apart from you. It’s much harder for you to help X and Y build a solid bond if your relationship to one or the other is weak (or absent).

N.B.: If you take a look at the visualizations on the top of page 1365 and remember that each point is supposed to be a person, they start to make more sense.

The benefit of weak ties: anything that gets passed along reaches a wider audience. (When Granovetter talks about diffusion, he’s talking about the spread of something among a network of people.) Think about job-hunting. If the only person you told about your job search was your BFF, how many opportunities would turn up? Not many–unless your BFF has a lot of weak ties that don’t overlap with your own, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t be your BFF.

Weak ties are also a vehicle for mobility. They improve an individual’s ability to move within their community. This applies to all facets of life–Granovetter is most concerned with employment, but it’s also something that happens at a party–the “life of the party” is someone who has at least a tenuous connection with most of the people present.

Weak ties may build community. Granovetter isn’t totally sure–this portion of the article is somewhat speculative. Nevertheless, if weak ties can serve as bridges, can connect the previously unconnected, they may do some of the work of community building.

Granovetter concludes by explaining why the “ties” model is a more fruitful one for sociological research–it doesn’t ask people what they’d like to have happen in their interpersonal connections, it asks them what actually does happen.

“The major implication intended by this paper is that the personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure, well beyond the purview or control of particular individuals. Linkage of micro and macro levels is thus no luxury but of central importance to the development of sociological theory. Such linkage generates paradoxes: weak ties, often denounced as generative of alienation…are here seen as indispensable to individuals’ opportunities and to their integration into communities; strong ties, breeding local cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation.”