I know we weren’t asked to post on any more articles, but this is one that I had prepared beforehand so I figured I’d go ahead and post it anyway…

This article was interesting because it presented a novel way to study and analyze interpersonal and inter-communal relationships. Granovetter argues that contrary to conventional thinking, information and opportunities travel more effectively along weaker ties, not stronger ones. For example, if you tell all your good friends of a job opening, and they tell all their good friends about that job opening, chances are you will hear the same information twice, since most of your friends friends are also your own friends. But if you tell all of your acquaintances about that job opening, and they tell all of their acquaintances, the information will spread to more people. Granovetter acknowledges that one of the weaknesses of his paper is the lack of empirical evidence, yet he offers logical and anecdotal evidence in its place. On page 1371, he tells of a random sampling of “professional, technical, and managerial jobber changers;” most people learned of a job opportunity not through strong ties, but through people they reported seeing “more than once a year but less than twice a week,” suggesting that these weak ties, often “an old college friend or a former workmate or employer” were the most effective sources of new information.

This argument is only somewhat with the evidence from other class readings about immigrant work networks. True, in many markets immigrants learn of work from acquaintances, often from the same home country. In Sewing Women, most hispanic immigrants working in the garment industry gain information through these “weak ties” (where there are jobs, where they can get better pay, etc.). Yet in New York’s chinatown shops, most new immigrants rely directly on “strong ties” (family connections) for work.

Still, Granovetter’s thesis has important implications. His discussion of Boston’s West End  was especially illustrative of how such weak and strong ties determine the collective attitude of a larger group or neighborhood. Perhaps one could even study the Macaulay community along similar lines: since any particular class within a particular campus is so small (suggesting strong ties to each other), we may have difficulty mobilizing as an whole entity (as an entire class, for example), because we lack those weak ties to those on other campuses who would otherwise spread enthusiasm and trust of a centralized leader to those of a different campus. Of course, this may be too simplistic an approach, but it’s worth consideration.