Economic Sociology – Another Venue for Network Analysis

There was an interesting article in the Boston Globe last weekend in the Ideas Section. Virginia Postrel wrote a piece, Market Share, on how a growing number of sociologists are starting to study core economic issues. Vivina Zeilzer, a Princeton sociologist is quoted as saying, “The economy is social. It’s a set of social relations.” She and others argue that the marketplace cannot be viewed separately from the social relations that fuel it. It is nice of academic sociology to notice this also.

Picking up from Mark Granovetter, the author points out how weak ties, those seemingly tangential relations we possess, are actually more effective in introducing us to new ideas and finding us a job, for example. Your close ties know you too well and tend to travel in the same circles so they are less likely to open new connections. This has been my personal experience ever since I was ten and got my first job through a weak tie. All subsequent employment has come through some type of social relationship, weak or strong.

As I mentioned yesterday, Patti Anklam's new 100 page report, The Social Network Toolkit published by the Ark Group gives a useful overview of the field of social network analysis form a business perspective. The rise of social networks is being studied by many disciplines. In many of these instances, the substance of the research is more defining that the discipline of departure. In part this advance in social relation research been fueled by the advent of new analytical tools such as Peter Gloor’s, TekFlo, and many others.

In parallel, the creation of more social relations through weak ties has been supported and enhanced by the new, more open, communication tools, such as blogs that promote the creation and maintenance of new weak ties. It was the expanding network of people that I met through my blog that provided many of the cases for our business blog guide. This community of weak ties is one of the major benefits of business blogs as these ties are more likely to become customers and business partners.

Comments

[brayden]

Economic sociologists have been doing SNA for over two decades (go see the vitaes of Ron Burt, Wayne Baker, and Mark Mizruchi). Just because the Boston Globe picks up on it in 2005 doesn't mean that it's new.