Tie Strength

The Strength of Weak Ties

Granovetter discusses a number of different aspects of tie strength and its implications, situating part of his analysis in the context of getting a job by posing the question: what type of tie should be more important for helping one get a job? He argues that the “common sense” response to this question is that those with whom one has strong ties (such as close friends and family members) will be more helpful in job searches because they are more motivated to help. There are theoretical reasons, however, to expect that weak ties (such as ties to acquaintances) will be more important, and he provides empirical support for this by presenting findings from a study of white-collar job changers.

According to Granovetter, weak ties and strong ties are distinct in a couple of important ways. First of all, people tend to have many more weak ties than strong ties. For example, individuals tend to have hundreds or thousands of ties to acquaintances. By contrast, people tend to have a relatively small number of strong ties, such as close friends and family members—typically half a dozen to a dozen. Second, there tends to be structural “inbreeding” with strong ties; that is, the people to whom one is strongly tied also tend to be tied to one another. One's friends tend to know one another, and one's family members tend to know one another. Weak ties are much less likely be inbred or to know one another. Thus, weak ties tend to stretch farther in terms of social distance.

The consequence of the differing properties of weak ties versus strong ties is that weak ties are much more likely to be sources of novel information, whereas information in one's strong-tie sector tends to be redundant; because one's friends tend to be interconnected, they also tend to possess the same information. Hence, to the extent that receiving novel information about the existence of a job is important in the job search process, in some situations, weak ties may be more useful for helping someone get a job.

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