"Man has been defined as an animal capable of profiting by the experience of others. Of his bodily life this would be wholly untrue: he is not nourished because another has eaten, or refreshed because another has slept. But as regards his mental life it is true and the way in which this profit is realized is by historical knowledge. The body of human thought or mental activity is a corporate possession and almost all the operations which our minds perform are operations which we learned to perform from others who have performed them already." (p. 226)Learning from others takes on many forms, such as storytelling. Storytelling and recall are prominent in communities of practice, a term Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger pioneered in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991). They theorize that knowledge is developed through social and spontaneous communities that are driven by common interests and passions. However, it stands to reason that such communities have been present all along. Examples abound, such as the formation of guilds in Medieval Europe.
Communities and social networks are best understood through Social Network Analysis (SNA). Kilduff and Tsai in Social Networks and Organizations clarify network analysis: concepts, terms and usage. On a network level, reference to terms such as density, centrality, reachability and balance are used. Tie-level concepts include strength of ties, reciprocity, and multiplexity. Other terms such as cluster, clique, star, and bridge provide concepts with which to interpret and describe findings based on network data. Amongst others, betweeness and distance or the nature of ties such as weak and strong ties or variations like bridging weak ties, have particular meaning for analysts.
With the advent of the Internet and the stellar rise of social networking recently, an understanding of social network analysis has become more prominent. A site like LinkedIn for example uses SNA by providing members with network analytical descriptions of their links with others (degrees); corporations like IBM and Microsoft use SNA to develop new solutions aimed at social network optimization, improved data mining and expert locators, amongst others. Readers of this blog might want to add more examples by posting a comment.
It is, however, my interest in collaborative learning, online social networks such as LinkedIn and the rise of vast networks of practice that have led me to renew my interest in Granovetter's original hypothesis about the strength of weak ties. In no small part has Charles Handy's views of a portfolio life, as outlined in The Elephant and the Flea and ideas about our existence in the new age as expressed in The Age of Unreason contribute to my rekindled interest. After all, the Internet has made some predictions and visions about the future of work possible, as described by various authors towards the second half of the 20th century.
There are of course questions galore: Why are social networking sites so successful at this point in time? Given statistics on social networks sites, why are people expanding their networks at such a relentless pace? What new social skills do we need to acquire in order to maintain these vast networks of predominantly weak ties? Why does it work? How different are our online networks from our offline networks? At what point do they mesh? What characterizes people's social networks at the first quarter of the 21st century? How does it influence the spread of social capital? What do people derive from their expansive global networks of interests and practices?
While these and many other questions are being investigated by scores of professional researchers from a wide range of disciplines, my own inquiry at this point it time stems from an interest in the real value people derive from their vast online social networks. Clearly, participants gain access to information and expertise not available locally. Furthermore, they can interact informally and free from the constraints of hierarchy and local rules which, like the invention of the printing press, freed knowledge and information. It surely gave people the opportunity to form their own opinions.
When Granovetter reflected on the nature of ties in 1973 he shed new light on networks and the effect of position in a network, but more importantly the effect of bridging weak ties. Recently revisited, he contends that there is merit in strong ties too, such as those found in kinships, families and close friends, amongst others. However, there is enough evidence to suggest that weak ties carry with them tremendous potential , in particular bridging weak ties. Related to job changers, Granovetter states:
At a more mundane level, I argued (SWT, pp. 1369-1373; 1974, pp. 51-62) that weak ties have a special role in a person's opportunity for mobility -- that there is a structural tendency for those to whom one is only weakly tied to have better access to job information one does not already have.
Although I don't consider the aspect of social network sites and job hunters here, Granovetter's hypothesis has a particular bearing on my interest in the value people derive from their weak ties. However, of interest amongst an array of other studies is "The Web of Knowledge: An Investigation of Knowledge Exchange in Networks of Practice" in which Samer Faraj and Molly McLure Wasko explore the knowledge exchange processes in extra-organizational networks of practice by studying three technical newsgroups. In this study they outline the influence of the nature of ties and as could be expected, they too refer to and use Granovetter's original ideas about weak ties.
What will follow in time is a more in-depth investigation of assistance and trust, help from strangers and reciprocity as influential determinants in collaborative networks and the spread of social capital.
Tags: Ideas of History, Social Capital, Social Network Analysis
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