Networks Of Weak Ties Research Articles

Identifying Mediators of Socio-Technical Capital in a Networked Learning Environment

Online learning environments can do more than support immediate instructional objectives: they can also enable participants to gain value from a network of scholars and resources. Networks of weak ties provide access to potential collaborators and novel information beyond what is available in one’s immediate strong tie circles. These resources for potential action have been termed "bridging social capital". Since the capital in socio-technical networks resides partially in how the technology enables contact between people, it has been called "socio-technical capital." Combining these ideas, we call the weak ties enabled by a technical environment "bridging socio-technical capital". Inspired by this idea, our software for networked learning, Prometheus, has been designed to support online university level education and teacher professional development under an open community model. In these online environments, a number of people who may have something in common are participating in task-specific workspaces that are embedded in a shared virtual space. Our objective is to design this space to offer affordances for the sharing of something of value between participants beyond the specific instrumental objectives that brought them to the workspaces (e.g., professional development activities or taking a course). The analysis reported in this paper examines the extent to which people who come to the university environment for instrumental objectives such as taking a course encounter persons or products of others from outside their assigned workspaces. Various digital artifacts available in Prometheus--discussions, resources, user profiles, and wiki pages--are compared in terms of how they support these encounters, which we call "spontaneous associations." Affiliation networks are created and analyzed to characterize and compare spontaneous and preassigned associations. Results show that there is appreciable bridging across classes and degree programs, but the types of artifacts studied play different roles in mediating bridging socio-technical capital as measured by spontaneous associations. While there is much more activity within wikis and discussions, little of that activity helps users expand beyond their assigned contexts, primarily because discussions and especially wikis are owned by task-specific workspaces with controlled membership. Meanwhile, an appreciable percentage of access to profiles and resources (about a third) are bridging events, but these artifacts support fewer associations and no interaction, which limits their contribution to bridging socio-technical capital. The results revealed that we need to find ways to make users aware of relevant discussions and especially wikis outside their primary workspaces, and to increase opportunities for interaction around resources and profiles. More generally, this work highlights the importance of looking beyond immediate instructional objectives to design for bridging socio-technical capital in networked learning environments, and offers one approach to identifying how digital objects mediate such capital.

With a Little Help from Our Colleagues: A Longitudinal Study of Social Networks for Innovation

In this paper we investigate the dynamics of networks of employees in the front end of the new product development process. So far, the literature has focused on network structure and has argued that sparse (low density) networks of weak ties are optimal for idea generation. In this paper we include both network structure and network content, and we emphasize the importance of strong ties, density, range, seniority and decision-maker involvement in specific phases of the front end in an environment of uncertainty, ambiguity and tacit knowledge. To test our assumptions, we mapped the full networks of 17 ideas for new product development projects over time in a longitudinal study in two research laboratories. For specific phases of the front end, we found confirmation of our expectations. In addition, it appeared that particularly strong ties between different units advance the adoption chances of ideas. The managerial implication of this latter finding is that communication with good acquaintances or friends in other units should be promoted in the front end of idea generation.

Global careers: a social capital paradox

Global careers, typically defined as involving multiple international relocations including various positions and assignments in several countries, have recently received increasing research attention. This interest is driven by a growing corporate need for managers who are able to deal with global integration and co-ordination in large multinational corporations. An important aspect of the competency of a global manager is his or her social capital, i.e. the network relationships he or she possesses. However, while the concept of social capital has been widely used in a number of research fields recently, it has received relatively little attention thus far in the IHRM context. This paper contributes to this research gap, and seeks to answer the empirical research question of how multiple international relocations affect the social capital of a manager. Our qualitative interviews of 20 Finnish MNC managers with global careers identified that such careers represent a ‘social capital paradox’. Global careers are characterized by a broad and diverse network of both internal and external ties. This breadth and diversity relate to (1) the managers' internal contact networks of weak ties (2) their internal support networks of strong ties and (3) their external networks of both strong and weak ties. These typical characteristics represent three major social capital paradoxes in the sense that they carry both significant social–capital-related benefits as well as potential risks.

THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL TIES AND SELF-EFFICACY IN FORMING ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTIONS AND MOTIVATING NASCENT BEHAVIOR

Theoretical models of entrepreneurship suggest that an individual's intention to start an enterprise is a strong predictor of eventual entrepreneurial action. Less understood are factors that influence the likelihood of entrepreneurial intentions and nascent behavior. In this study, we develop and test several hypotheses about how social network ties and self-efficacy affect entrepreneurial intentions and nascent behavior. We found that a personal network of supportive strong ties coupled with high entrepreneurial self-efficacy increases the likelihood of entrepreneurial intentions and nascent behavior. A personal network of weak ties with practical business knowledge and experience also increases the likelihood of entrepreneurial nascent behavior but not entrepreneurial intentions. In contrast, a personal network of strong ties with practical business knowledge and experience has little effect on either intentions or nascent behavior and may, in fact, suppress both. The contribution of this study to nascent entrepreneurship research and implications for future research are discussed.

How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks

This article examines the relationship between different forms of cultural taste and the density of social contacts across alternative types of network relations classified by average tie strength. The author builds on Bourdieu's ([1986] 2001) classic statement on the “forms of capital” (economic, social, and cultural) and the conversion dynamics among them, and on DiMaggio's (1987) connection between cultural tastes and sociability. He hypothesizes that (1) in addition to cultural tastes being determined by network relations, cultural tastes are used to form and sustain those networks. Furthermore he expects that (2) highbrow culture taste will be less likely to be converted into social capital beyond immediate strong-tie circles due to its more restricted, “assetspecific” nature. Because of its generalized appeal, taste for popular culture will be more likely to be associated with weak-tie network density. The results broadly support these hypotheses: a model that specifies an effect of culture on network density provides a better fit to the data than the traditional conception of networks as determining taste. In addition using log-linear models and instrumental-variable methods, I show that popular culture consumption has a positive impact on weak-tie network density but not strong-tie network density, while highbrow culture consumption selectively increases strong-tie density but has no appreciable effect on weak ties, net of standard socioeconomic variables. These findings help to shed light on the mechanisms that translate mastery of different types of cultural knowledge into integration across distant social positions or closure around strong group boundaries. The author also discusses the implications of the results for current models describing the transformation of cultural into social resources.

Labor Market Implications of Weak Ties

1. IntroductionMany of us have heard the phrase it's not what you know but who you know. While this may not be strictly true, approximately one half of workers in the United States do find employment through friends, relatives, and other social contacts (Granovetter 1995). Further, in a seminal paper, Granovetter (1973) argues that, for the purpose of finding jobs, it is acquaintances, not close friends, who are most important in helping individuals find employment. He claims that friends whom one knows well are likely to be close in social space. Close friends know one's other close friends and tend to have social networks similar to each other. Thus, any information held by a given close friend may be obtained from other close friends as well; the job information of close friends is often redundant. In contrast, acquaintances tend to have less similar social networks and know different people from one's close friends. Granovetter argued that acquaintances also are more likely to have different information about available jobs, which makes them valuable job contacts. Granovetter labeled acquaintances as weak ties as opposed to close friends, who are known as strong ties.In this article, I am defining weak and strong ties as Granovetter (1983) did. Weak ties are acquaintances and strong ties are close friends. The important point of these definitions is the idea that, on average, acquaintances are less likely to know one's other friends than strong ties. On average, the social network of strong ties has more overlap than the social network of weak ties. As I will explain in more detail below, the lack of overlap of acquaintances implies that a social network with more weak ties will be larger (will have more range) than a social network with fewer weak ties.Since Granovetter's article, much work has been done by other scholars to validate the importance of weak ties in labor markets by answering two questions: First, researchers asked whether weak ties are a common source of finding employment. These studies have been successful in demonstrating that weak ties are indeed an important source of finding employment. For instance, in Granovetter (1973), of the people finding jobs through referral sources (such as friends, family, and other personal contacts), 27.8% use weak ties, 16.7% use strong ties, and the majority, 55.6%, use ties of moderate strength in between weak and strong. Others have replicated the finding that weak ties are a common means of finding employment.1 In summary, this line of research has demonstrated that, as Granovetter claimed, weak ties do play an important role in matching workers and jobs. Second, because weak ties appear to be important in locating jobs, researchers have asked if the use of weak ties as a job-finding method increases income (Bridges and Villemez 1986; Marsden and Hurlbert 1988; Wegener 1991). The findings of these studies suggest that there is little evidence of a relationship between weak ties and income. (Note that the hypothesized link between weak ties and income was not a part of Granovetter's hypothesis, as he makes clear in Granovetter [1983].)The present article can be seen as an extension to this second line of questioning. In this article, I use an example to show that previous methods used to measure the effect of weak ties on income will underestimate the effect, if it exists. I then provide a new method of estimating the effect of weak ties on income that directly considers the social network of individuals. Granovetter's idea that weak ties are more likely to provide novel information rests on the idea that weak ties are less likely to overlap than strong ties, on average. In other words, weak ties know a smaller fraction of one's other friends compared with strong ties, on average. I use this idea to show that less overlap in friendships increases the range of an individual's social network. …

Community‐Embedded Learning

Online learners often stay located in, and tied to, their communities, kinship networks, households, and workplaces. Institutions providing online education can thus create ties to communities as students draw their learning into networks in which they are already embedded. Frequent interactions across multiple media that are afforded by information and communication technologies (ICT) allow students to create strong ties with their fellow students and instructors. Those relationships provide a network of weak ties that is indirectly available to friends, coworkers, and community members who live and work near the students. Community‐embedded learning that takes advantage of these strong and weak ties and is appropriate to ICT modes of delivery is important for two reasons. The various clienteles served by students while they earn their degrees will affect library and information science (LIS) education and outcomes, and LIS distance education offered via interactive ICT can directly affect the clienteles served.

Strong, Weak, and Latent Ties and the Impact of New Media

This article argues that consideration of the strength of ties between communicators can help reconcile disparate results on the impact of new media on social relations. It is argued from the research literature and studies by the author that where ties are strong, communicators can influence each other to adapt and expand their use of media to support the exchanges important to their tie, but where ties are weak, communicators are dependent on common, organizationally established means of communication and protocols established by others. Due to this differential use of media, a new medium that adds means and opportunities for previously unconnected others to communicate will have positive effects on weak ties and weak-tie networks, in particular by laying an infrastructure of latent ties (ones that exist technically but have not yet been activated), and providing an opportunity for weak ties to develop and strengthen. A new medium may also have positive effects on strongly tied pairs where it adds another means of communicating and supports the communication needs and tasks of the pair. However, where a new medium replaces a former, common means of communication, the dependence of weak ties on a common medium makes weak-tie networks highly susceptible to dissolution. In contrast, strong-tie networks, with their connections via multiple relations and multiple media, can be expected to be more robust under conditions of change.

Social Networks and Citizen Response to Legal Change

Our goal is to extend the research on the political importance of social networks by investigating the role of networks in shaping citizen responses to changes in the law. We emphasize the development of special-purpose social networks to cope with changing legal requirements and analyze these networks from a problem-solving perspective. The empirical focus of the work is taxpayers' adaptation to the 1986 Tax Reform Act. The results from a panel survey of 475 taxpayers demonstrate that specialized, weak-tie networks play a critical role in shaping responses to legal change. More important problems (i.e., tax increases) stimulate search among broader networks. Broader networks, in turn, lead to greater knowledge about the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Network search is biased by both taxpayer attitudes and motivation: taxpayers seek likeminded discussants, and bigger tax increases lead to more noncompliant weak-tie discussants. Finally, the attitudes of weak-tie discussants produce changes in taxpayers' attitudes about compliance, confirming the important role of networks in shaping compliance behavior. he social context has been viewed as a critical constraint on the information-gathering opportunities of the citizen at least since the Columbia voting studies by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1948). Information about the political system is filtered through existing social networks, with political attitudes and knowledge strongly influenced by discussions with friends, neighbors, relatives, and government officials to whom the citizen is networked in a variety of settings (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987, 1991, 1995). Our goal is to extend the research on social networks in two directions. First, we investigate the role of networks in shaping citizen responses to changes in the law. Few citizens actually read new statutes, but rely instead on information, interpretations, and evaluations of the law available from various intermediate sources. Although recent research has explored the role of social networks in voting behavior (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995), we know less about the role of networks in shaping knowledge of and willingness to obey new laws. Yet such knowledge is a precondition for compliance with citizenship obligations (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Second, we emphasize the problem-solving aspects of network analysis, an approach to citizen behavior that provides a fruitful middle ground between the extremes of individual rationality and social determinism. While research in sociology has examined the role of networks in solving problems (Warren 1981; Stoller and Pugliesi 1991), most of these studies focus on the role of a single personal network. We assume instead that boundedly rational citizens are capable of developing multiple, specialpurpose discussion networks to deal with specialized problems. Although the single, multi-purpose network considered in most network analyses is primarily determined by social structure, specialized networks are also

Professional Associations as Important Mediators of the Innovation Process

Innovation depends on new ideas entering an organization and being translated into something implemented and used. This article identifies the determinants of this knowledge acquisition and transfer. Knowledge is diffused through a variety of networks. One potentially important network is formed by professional associations, which diffuse a specific body of knowledge to practitioners and create informal networks of weak ties, linking members from different organizations. A survey of a particular association's members is used to identify the variables that predict the level of two types of technological innovation. Results show that professional association networks are important for innovation in specific, operational technologies, although internal communication factors and organization size are also significant predictors. For more complex technologies that have implications for the overall philosophy of operations, different predictors—the existence of a technology strategy, the level of external communication, and the level of influence of individuals—are relevant.

How do communities act? Unique events and purposeful strategies in the formation of an industrial base in rivertown

Using an ethnographic case study, this research examines three competing hypotheses of how a community acts. The study attempts to reconstruct the events that led various actors in the community to seek the formation of an industrial base as an alternative economic source for the community. The roles of unique events, specific persons and particular strategies in the formation of the industrial base are examined. It was found that unique events play a very important role in the community's concern over economic alternatives to agriculture and their success in securing such alternatives. These events were also important to key individuals within the community, placing them in positions to act in the industrial base formation. Strategies of community action used in the industrial base formation and since that time were found to be consistent with the “centralized weak-tie network” hypothesis of action or ganization. This type of community action organization seems to be very effective at the community level but tends to be very exclusionary of the community population as a whole.

Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres

Using the historical example of Tokugawa Japan (1603-1867), we point out how artistic circles provided a “virtual world,” a kind of early modern “second life.” This world gave their participants the opportunity to escape from the vertical, hierarchical, feudal structure through the creation of horizontal public spheres, in loosely coupled networks based on the strength of weak ties. In an often playful way, these aesthetic circles provided alternative forms of sociability to premodern Japanese people. This in turn had a serious impact on the formation of political modernity in Japan. We explore parallels with the virtual world of Second Life. There, too, new public spheres are being carved out, in equally playful and largel apolitical ways, that may yet have profound and unforeseen consequences for society at large. We illustrate our analysis with two novel examples of communicative spheres in Second Life, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics and a broadly interdisciplinary initiative called Play as Being. In conclusion, we see the need for a theoretical revision of the notion of “public sphere” beyond its conventional usage. As the virtual worlds of Tokugawa, Japan and Second Life illustrate, the strength of weak-tie networks can form the basis for public spheres in a surprisingly large spectrum of times, locations and cultures.