8/19/2019 "Strength of weak ties"- a citation classic

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Mark Granovetter, born in 1943 in Jersey City, NJ is currently the Joan Butler Ford Professor

in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and his current research

interests include economic sociology, political sociology, social inequality and stratification.

His 1973 paper titled ‘The strength of weak ties’, published in the American Journal of

Sociology is the most cited sociology article with more than 35,000 citations according to

Google Scholar and 7,987 citations within Web of Science core collection, as of October

2015. Interestingly an earlier version of this paper submitted to American Sociological

Review in 1969 was outright rejected noting, among other things, “his scholarship is

somewhat elementary”.

This paper attempts to address the inability of sociological theory to relate micro level

interactions to macro level patterns, which was a fundamental weakness in sociologicaltheory at the time. The research is of exploratory nature, providing a qualitative discussion

which sets up the basis for a new area of research which would later, by others, be evolved

with consideration to other complications and with the help of mathematical models. The

discussion within this paper is limited to the strength of interpersonal ties, setting aside other

important characteristics involving the content of the tie, and to how those interpersonal ties

influence macro phenomena such as diffusion, social mobility, political organization and

social cohesion.

As evident by the number of citations, this paper had significant impact in sociological theory

 by exploring a once disregarded aspects of weak ties and macro-micro interrelationship of

social networks. Especially this paper lead to significant improvements in understanding of

labour market and, more recently, the rapid growth of internet based social networks.