Weak Ties

Weak ties are best defined in contrast to strong ties. Strong ties involve relationships with intimate social partners. Researchers have devoted considerable attention to close relationships and have linked these ties to lower morbidity and mortality throughout life. Yet, people also retain an array of nonintimate social ties. These ties have received less attention in the research literature. Scholars who study nonintimate ties refer to them as weak ties or peripheral ties. In everyday parlance, people call them “acquaintances.” The key features of these ties involve the social partners mutual recognition and repeated interactions but an absence of intimacy or commitment. In early scholarship, frequency of contact distinguished these ties from strangers in the public realm known as “nodding relationships” or “familiar strangers”; weak ties involved more frequent contact than with people who were truly strangers. With technological [Page 1684]advances such as text messaging, listservs, blogs, and social networking sites, these distinctions are blurred. Even individuals who are little more than strangers establish repeated interactions and weak ties. This entry discusses the places where individuals encounter weak ties, historical changes in weak ties, and the functions of weak ties.

Weak ties arise in a wide array of settings. The development of relationships often involves a stage as weak ties; acquaintanceship often precedes friendship. Likewise, the disbarring of intimate relationships can engender weak ties, particularly when relationships move from active to passive. Friends who have drifted apart may rest on the periphery of the social network. Other ties may remain perpetually weak, particularly in the business world. Coworkers who do not progress to friendship, clients who frequent a business where they recognize the staff, and professionals such as haircutters, lawyers, or doctors with repeat customers establish such loose relationships. Some weak ties are steeped in a shared environment (neighbors), affiliation (clubs or churches), or Internet sites of various sorts. Close social networks also may engender weak ties; friends-of-friends or distant relatives are tenuously linked. Finally, individuals also may actively seek weak ties to people who have resources they need at different points in their lives.

Scholars interested in social networks sometimes refer to weak ties as peripheral relationships and closer ties as core relationships. Core relationships may vary from very intimate to less intimate, and peripheral ties are a subset of weak ties that individuals might list as members of their network, but not among their close ties. Research on social networks reveals that peripheral ties are more fluid than core ties are. Intimate ties are fairly stable over time, but weak ties tend to vary. At one point in time, an individuals cadre of peripheral ties may be distinct from the cadre of peripheral ties at a subsequent point in time. Peripheral ties by definition require less investment than do core ties and thus, are more expendable. Core intimate relationships often are steeped in longer-term family ties or commitments and are harder to form or disband.

The pervasiveness of weak ties in daily life is a fairly modern occurrence. Three shifts in human history account for increases in contact with peripheral social ties: (1) the shift to intensified agriculture, (2) industrialization and urbanization, and (3) recent technologies facilitating contact with distant social contacts. Starting with horticultural societies, individuals began to interact with non-intimate social partners on a periodic basis to facilitate trade. More recently, industrial economies have required a surge in connection to people outside the family. Individuals employed for pay may spend more time with coworkers than with their intimates. Finally, beginning with the pony express, people have been able to communicate with social partners outside the intimates in their immediate environment. Technological advances proliferated in the 20th century with telephone, fax machines, and computers facilitating communication. In the 21st century, social networking Web sites encourage individuals to connect to a range of weak ties via friends-of-friends, common interests, and shared affiliations, and technological advances facilitate the maintenance and management of a large array of weak ties.

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