7 - Brokers and Bridges

Summary

Introduction

A person with many friends and acquaintances has better chances of getting help or information. Therefore, social ties are one measure of social capital, an asset that can be used by actors for positive advantage. Network analysts, however, discovered that the kind of tie is important in addition to the sheer number of ties. Their general argument is that strong (i.e., frequent or intense) ties with people who are themselves related yield less useful information than weak ties with people who do not know one another. Having a lot of ties within a group exposes a person to the same information over and over again, whereas ties outside one's group yield more diverse information that is worth passing on or retaining to make a profit.

As a consequence, we have to pay attention to the ties between a person's contacts. A person who is connected to people who are themselves not directly connected has opportunities to mediate between them and profit from his or her mediation. The ties of this person bridge the structural holes between others. It is hypothesized that people and organizations who bridge structural holes between others have more control and perform better.

In this chapter, we first discuss bridges at the level of the entire network (Section 7.3). Which ties (bridges) and which vertices (cut-vertices) are indispensable for the network to remain connected? If a network contains such ties and vertices, it contains bottlenecks and the flow of information through the network is vulnerable.