Structural Holes, Ron Burt

Here's a revision of a review first posted to Vacuum 5 years ago, and then posted to Amazon. The book in question is Structural Holes by Ron Burt - note that he has a new one coming out this summer called Brokerage and Closure that expands on these ideas.

The network structure of social capital, April 5, 2000
Reviewer: Edward Vielmetti (Ann Arbor, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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"The Network Structure of Social Capital" by Ronald Burt at the U Chicago Graduate School of Business is one paper that held my attention. "Social capital" is a metaphor for the accumulated wealth built up in a personal network; better connected people have more social capital, and as a result they gain advantages in social situations. Burt's thesis is that social capital depends on not just the size of your social network, but also its nature and structure. Here's a brief summary.

If you're looking to get ahead, you should aim to build a circle of work and personal contacts that is broad and diverse. The more diverse your contacts, the more likely it is that you will find an opportunity through them. It's particularly important not to narrow your networking efforts to a single clique of all like-minded people who all know each other and don't mix much with others; maintaining such connections gets in the way of more productive efforts that bring in a steady mix of new faces.

When you have a network that gives you the opportunity to connect two widely diverse parts of an enterprise together, or when you can bring friends together who know you but don't know each other, you stand in the role of gaudius tertius, "the third who benefits". Even if you don't explicitly control the relationship (now I don't want to sound too mercenary here; remember, this is social science, not Emily Post) you will still benefit from the control of and access to flow between two elements that have been insulated from each other.

The pieces of an organization's or a population's network that don't communicate much are insulated by what Burt calls "Structural Holes" (the title of one of his books). He goes into detail studying behavior and networks of senior managers in an organization trying to find structural holes and predicting with a fair degree of accuracy who will get ahead in the corporate game by how big people's networks are (bigger is better), how centered their networks are on their bosses (all things equal, you'd rather know people who your boss doesn't -- but take advantage of your boss's network to bootstrap your own) and the overlaps in their contacts networks (be the bridge between people who don't know each other).

A good read, if you're into theory, though a bit of a slog at times. The author appears to bear a bit of a grudge against some fellow academics who disagree with his conclusions - those academics went off and formed a little clique that's busy quoting each other and recommending that senior managers build little cliques within their own companies. I believe that eclectic networks bring the best results persuasion by my nature. (Witness Vacuum.)

[Originally from Vacuum #11. http://vacuum.mi.org]