Strength Of Weak Ties Research Articles

“The Strength of Weak Ties” Revisited: Achieving True Integration of Disease Management and Lifestyle Management

“The Strength of Weak Ties” Revisited: Achieving True Integration of Disease Management and Lifestyle Management

A Strength of Weak Ties Revisited: A Study on Effects of Weak Tie on Career Maturity of Teenagers

A Strength of Weak Ties Revisited: A Study on Effects of Weak Tie on Career Maturity of Teenagers

Médecins généralistes et recommandations médicales : une approche sociologique

Background While designed to help physicians in their account of the changing state of the art and of the evidence-based medicine, the situation of the medical guidelines seem to be critical: they need time, they are too complex, they deal with pathologies as if they were isolated from the whole context. Methods In the survey, 279 general practioners were asked to answer a scenario dealing with these difficulties. Results More than a half of the practitioners interviewed approve the increasing role of guidelines in medical practice and say they try to take them into account, but they also say they generally rely on their own medical experience to operate a selection among the impressive set of guidelines they receive. The more they agree with an evidence-based medicine, the more they tend to accept the guidelines as a necessary dimension of their art. Conclusion The inquiry leads to a contrasted opinion: on the one hand, it incites to ameliorate the whole guidelines making process (paying attention to let the bottom up informations penetrate the process), and on the other hand, to admit that the imperfect appropriation of these norms is the presently best way to match the “saintly models” of medicine with the unescapable “dirty work” of everyday practice (as in the “strength of weak ties” effect).

Loneliness and belonging: A reflection on the meanings and values of social networks in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

This reflection draws on the author's personal and professional interest in social networks, social capital, and community to explore the implications of losing significant members of one's social network to catastrophic events such as the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech (VT) shootings. Social theorists posit that the strength of weak ties comes from the opportunities that they present. Weak ties offer opportunities to meet others, expand networks, and become more embedded in our communities. Therefore, for the author, the events of 4/16 represent not only the loss of a friend but also a loss of opportunity. The VT shootings have pushed him to consider whether personal relationships and social networks can be objectified to the point that they may be managed. On a second analytical level, the shootings have pushed him to ask how local governments may incorporate social networks, community, and social capital into emergency planning and recovery efforts. Language: en

Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties

The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long—they connect socially distant locations, allowing information to diffuse rapidly. The authors test whether this “strength of weak ties” generalizes from simple to complex contagions. Complex contagions require social affirmation from multiple sources. Examples include the spread of high‐risk social movements, avant garde fashions, and unproven technologies. Results show that as adoption thresholds increase, long ties can impede diffusion. Complex contagions depend primarily on the width of the bridges across a network, not just their length. Wide bridges are a characteristic feature of many spatial networks, which may account in part for the widely observed tendency for social movements to diffuse spatially.

The strength of weak ties in crime

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether weak ties play an important role in explaining criminal activities. We first develop a model where individuals learn about crime opportunities by interacting with other peers. These interactions can take the form of either strong or weak ties. We find that increasing the percentage of weak ties induces more transitions from non-crime to crime and thus the crime rate in the economy increases. This is because, when the percentage of weak ties is high, delinquents and non-delinquents are in close contact with each other. We then test these predictions using the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), which contains unique detailed informations on friendship relationships among teenagers. The theoretical predictions of our model are confirmed by the empirical analysis since we find that weak ties, as measured by friends of friends, have a positive impact on criminal activities.

'Market-Faces' and Market Forces: [Corn-]Factors in the Moral Economy of Casterbridge

Questions of appropriate behaviour, mercantile integrity and market forces reverberate throughout Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. This article attempts to analyse the ‘corn factor’: both the wife-selling self-destructive ‘hero’, and the ubiquitous presence of grain. Integral to almost every conflict or crisis in the creation, continuation or destruction of human bonds within the novel is the consumption or exchange of seeds, grain or the products and goods made from them. In tracing a path from furmity to skimmity, the article examines what Hardy reveals concerning the impossibility of restoring what has been spoiled. Concepts from the disciplines of political history and economic sociology, such as E. P. Thompson's notion of ‘the moral economy’, or Mark Granovetter's construct of ‘the strength of weak ties’, are applied to this market town to demonstrate that bread is simultaneously a staple and a symbol of what binds individuals and families together in society.

The ‘Strength of Weak Ties’: Social Networking by Business Owners in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

Drawing on recent studies of the importance of social networks and embeddedness in affecting the operation of businesses, this article reports the results of an empirical study of the social networks maintained by business owners located in three small towns in the highly peripheral Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Through a combination of a large-scale postal questionnaires and qualitative semi-structured interviews, the study found that, although business owners in all three towns place importance on maintaining embedded ties, there are differences between the towns in terms of the characteristics of the social networks maintained by owners. The respondents suggest several explanations for these differing patterns, including the number of in-migrants in the local area and the cultural characteristics of local people. The article discusses the implications of these patterns for the future development of the businesses and the towns in which they are located. In particular, it is argued that the strength of local social networks maintained by owners in very remote Wick may serve to hamper both their future business development and that of the wider local economy.

Labor markets and organizations: A screening theory of hiring networks and racially homogeneous employment

This theoretical analysis uses three relationships between individual and organizational performance to help explain when organizations will use different labor markets to organize employment and when they will use different hiring networks. Granovetter's [Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1381] distinctions about job seekers’ networks are combined with Jacobs’ [Jacobs, D. (1981). Towards a theory of mobility and behavior in organizations: An inquiry into the consequences of relationships between individual performance and organizational success. American Journal of Sociology, 87, 684–707] and Marsden and Campbell's [Marsden, P. V., & Campbell, K. E. (1990). Recruitment and selection processes: The organizational side of job searches. In R. Breiger (Ed.), Social mobility and social structures (pp. 59–79). New York: Cambridge University Press] work on employers’ recruitment and screening strategies to develop insights about when weak or strong ties will be used in the hiring process. Strong ties between a job seeker and an intermediary and between the intermediary and an employer are possible without also assuming a tie between the job seeker and the employer. This is possible because the tie between the job seeker and the intermediary exists in a different kind of network than the tie between the intermediary and the employer. When employees can only hurt collective efforts and employers are concerned about the quality of information about job seekers, administrators will prefer strong ties. These ideas also explain when ethnic homogeneity in hiring will be most prevalent.

Social Capital, Labour Precariousness and the Economic Performance: An Empirical Assessment of the Strength of Weak Ties in Italy

This paper carries out an assessment of the influence that different kinds of social ties exert on labour precariousness, on the state of health of urban environments and on the economic performance in Italy. Overall, the empirical evidence shows that weak ties connecting members of voluntary organizations positively affect the economic performance and the quality of urban ecosystems, differently from strong ties connecting family members and close friends, which, on the other side, are proved to reduce labour precariousness.

Psychological predispositions and network structure: The relationship between individual predispositions, structural holes and network closure

We examine the effect of individual psychological differences on network structures, proposing several hypotheses about how individual differences might predispose actors to structure their social environment by seeking network closure or by sustaining structural holes. We introduce a new triad census method to examine personal networks of strong and weak ties. For 125 egocentric networks we correlated the triad census results with several extensively researched psychological instruments. The triad census reduced to three principal components, describing central aspects of strength-of-weak-ties and structural holes theories. Psychological predispositions explained a significant proportion of the variance in each of these components. Our results suggest that people who see themselves vulnerable to external forces tend to inhabit closed networks of weak connections. On the other hand, people who seek to keep their strong tie partners apart, and thereby bridge structural holes, tend to be individualists, to believe that they control the events in their lives, and to have higher levels of neuroticism. Finally, people with strong network closure and “weak” structural holes (as with the “strength of weak ties”) tend to categorize themselves and others in terms of group memberships. They also tend to be more extraverted and less individualistic.

Introduction

Terrorism is a term constructed during the European Enlightenment era and inextricably associated with nation-building. To argue that terrorism has existed for all time is not only imprecise, but also creates serious problems for scholars who try to analyze terrorism systematically. Though the content of each article in this special issue reflects significantly different perspectives, terrorism is in the process of being negotiated and renegotiated within the changing boundaries of territories, nations and states. The research presented here, whether intentionally or not, emanates from this basic assumption. From fear of torture to the commemorative processes of civil society, terrorism is invoked to inspire and mobilize the national soul and (re)establish the sovereignty of political boundaries-states. When we received the invitation to create this special issue on terrorism, we realized that our approach to the study of terrorism would be challenged. Our approach focuses upon how definitions of terrorism and terrorists are created and the impact of those definitions. From the sociological study of law and deviance, we examine the processes that shift the moral boundaries, for example, between normal and deviant action. Under what conditions is deviant or violent action labeled as terrorism rather than war, revolution or protest? Surprisingly, a systematic review of the research on terrorism reveals a paucity of work in this area. Our approach also stresses the relevance of examining the role of the state in the construction of terrorism and terrorists. For the purpose of this issue, we build on the straightforward view of the state as outlined by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who emphasized the power of the military-industrial complex. As a former President and United States Army general, he was sensitive not only to the inappropriate use of power by the state in effecting change, but also to the ability of the state to evade the checks and balances of government. Of course, now the state has become the military-postindustrial complex and frequently operates through multinational corporations that often are beyond the control of moral or legal regulations. In addition, the state typically uses inappropriate means to maintain or expand its power, domination, and profit. United States Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis recognized the potential terror of institutionalized violence as practiced by the state. The state can legitimate the use of terror as a formal rational practice in the form of collateral damage or saturation bombing. The state is conceptualized here as the political apparatus that controls or attempts to control society. Recent research claims that globalization is weakening the state; for example, many suggest that the increasing power of multinational corporations and international nongovernmental organizations is eroding the state's power (Ohmae, 1995; Tanzi and Schuknecht, 1997). It seems premature to comment on this research, except to say that what we may be witnessing is in fact the development of different forms of the global state. Surely, the sociological perspectives on interlocking organizations, including the strength of weak ties, should be useful for future research on this topic. Some of the scholars whose work is included in this special issue use a framework similar to ours; however, we also accepted articles that focus upon the reasons people cross moral boundaries since that perspective can be useful in comparative sociological work. These articles also challenge other scholars to address the concept of terrorism directly in a meaningful way (Senechal de la Roche, 2004; Stern, 2003). In the first article, Charles Tilly critiques theories on terrorism by Jessica Stern, a 'former superterrorism fellow' in her popular book Terror in the Name of God, comparing Stern's definitions of terrorism with those definitions disseminated by the United States government. …

Different ties for different needs: Recruitment practices of entrepreneurial firms at different developmental phases

AbstractEntrepreneurial firms face significant challenges in attracting and acquiring needed human resources. That is, in addition to difficulties associated with resource constraints and organization legitimacy, the requirements for “person‐organization fit” change substantially as these firms transit from start‐up to growth phase. This study examines how entrepreneurial firms tap evolving social network ties in order to address “needs‐and‐fits” issues across different developmental stages of the firm. The findings go beyond what “strength of weak ties” and “structural hole” theories would suggest, and highlight the persistent use of strong and direct ties across developmental phases. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A dynamic model of job networking and social influences on employment

This paper explores an economy in which personal connections facilitate job search. In the model, a firm receives information on the productivity of those job applicants with social ties to its current employees. In addition to providing a theory of networking, the model endogenously generates two classic theories in economic sociology. First, there is a highly non-linear relationship between average human capital in a group of socially connected individuals and the group's employment rate. Small changes in group composition may cause large changes in employment, as suggested in Wilson's ‘social isolation’ explanation for high unemployment rates among poor African-Americans. The model also supports Granovetter's ‘strength of weak ties’ hypothesis, which holds that acquaintances are more valuable job contacts than close friends.

A social network caught in the Web

We present an analysis of Club Nexus, an online community at Stanford University. Through the Nexus site we were able to study a reflection of the real world community structure within the student body. We observed and measured social network phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, and the strength of weak ties. Using the rich profile data provided by the users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases. In addition, we found correlations between users' personalities and their other attributes, as well as interesting correspondences between how users perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others.

The Empire Strikes Back? An exploration of centre–periphery interaction between the ICAEW and accounting associations in the self-governing colonies of Australia, Canada and South Africa, 1880–1907

British imperialism not only changed borders, it made the British model of accounting associations and the imaginary of ‘professional accounting men’ known to spaces far from the metropolis (mother state). Imperialism was thus integrative in this sense. In administrative terms, however, a very large, differentiated and spatially dispersed Empire became expensive. It could not be ruled uniformly or in detail and different governance structures emerged. In the settler colonies, relatively autonomous ‘self-government’ embodying variants of British precedents and institutions, provided a loose coupling of centre and periphery. The accounting associations that developed in this type of colony were, then, not compliant clones of the centre but hybrids reflecting the specificity of place and British accommodation of peripheral demands. The result was the emergence of an imperial accountancy arena. These empirics contribute to our understanding of the nineteenth century professionalisation of accounting as a cross-border phenomenon by showing how the strength of weak ties between parts of a periphery characterised by inter-colony differences (as well as similarities) imposed constraints on the imperial centre.

Token Salaries and Social Answers in Work Relations in Africa

In Dakar, faced with crisis and uncertainty, social answers begin to appear. Only those having a supportive social network could find a place in the labour's market. The observation of the daily routine of any of Dakarís micro-businesses and its social aspects, reveals the wide area of interference that exists between waged worker and the relation networks with family and relatives, ethnic groups and Muslim brotherhoods. The urban economy is supported by a network of family, alliance, and client relations. The overlap existing between waged and unwaged work can be understood only by looking closely at the network of social ties present outside the production site. Switching from the analysis of urban work relationships in Africa to the analysis of social networks is almost spontaneous, because a system of relational actions and strategies grows around the figure of the worker. The importance of the “strength of weak ties” in procuring employment is as a whole confirmed, but African sociability creates an intense inter-network relational interchange. Dakarís urban space feeds a “popular economy” where social networks and the gift-giving logic co-exist with market economy. This economy utilise different wage embryos or tokens salaries for each of the social players.

Weak Ties, Strong Ties: Network Principles in Mexican Migration

Five network principles are elaborated from literature on Mexican immigrants and from research that I conducted on immigration from a rancho in Jalisco state to a variety of destinations within the United States. These principles are, first, that networks are multilocal, encompassing a number of geographical destinations. The importance of destinations, however, may change over time. Second, the anchoring points at any given geographical location are the work sites where immigrants find employment. Thus, labor market conditions structure where immigrants go and where they stay. Third, new geographical locations are often accessed through the strength of weak ties, leading to geographic dispersion. Over time, some weak ties may be converted to strong ties though marriage or compadrazgo. Fourth, both dense networks and diffuse, weak-tie, or acquaintance networks constitute social capital for their members. Fifth, given the geographical dispersion at the work site and/or work type clustering found among ...

The Strength of Weak Ties in Lobbying Networks

How does policy information flow through Washington `issue networks'? And how does information flow determine which lobbyists get access in policy-making? Drawing upon the `strength of weak ties' argument, the authors argue that policy information passes more through acquaintances (`weak ties') than through close, trusted, contacts (`strong ties'). They support this argument in an analysis of data on lobbying networks in health-care policy-making in the 1970s and 1980s. The statistical analyses show that access to policy-makers in Washington is network-autocorrelated: a lobbyist's access depends upon the access of other lobbyists s/he knows. The results demonstrate the importance of weak ties as a restricted form of `social capital' in policy-making.

A critical examination of the advantages of investigating community and leisure from a social network perspective

In an attempt to appreciate the contribution that social network analysis might offer to the study of leisure, four distinctive, though not mutually exclusive, approaches to social network analysis are considered and an overall critique of the approach offered, paying special attention to the work of Wellman. Within this critique is a discussion of the ontological, epistemological and methodological problems confronting the social network perspective, particularly the works of those analysts, such as Stokowski (1994), who have attempted to merge structural analysis with more action-based perspectives. Some comparisons are made with figurational sociology and structuration theory, and attention is drawn to three central explanatory tools deployed within network analysis: the strength of weak ties, sociometry, and network density.