Mark Granovetter

• 1. Introduction

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  Mark Granovetter submitted the paper that would define his career to the American Sociological Review in 1969, and the editors rejected it. When the American Journal of Sociology published it in 1973, "The Strength of Weak Ties" began accumulating citations. That total would eventually exceed 78,000, according to Google Scholar. Data from the Web of Science show that Granovetter has written both the first and third most cited sociology articles ever produced. How does a paper about casual acquaintances earn that kind of reach? And what does it have to do with the theories Granovetter would later build about economic markets and collective behavior? The answers begin with the definition of a weak tie.

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• 2. Bridges Across Clusters

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  "Getting A Job" began as a doctoral dissertation filed at Harvard's Department of Social Relations. Its original title was "Changing Jobs: Channels of Mobility Information in a Suburban Population," and it ran to 313 pages. Granovetter argued that acquaintanceships not reinforced by many mutual friendships carry more novel information than close friendships do. That argument provided the conceptual core of both the dissertation and "The Strength of Weak Ties." Close friends share overlapping social worlds; they already know what each other knows. A weak tie, by contrast, stretches across the boundary between two otherwise separate social clusters, carrying information from one world into another. In marketing, information science, and politics, that capacity means weak ties can reach populations that strong ties simply cannot access. "The Strength of Weak Ties" eventually became the most cited work across all of the social sciences. That way of thinking about social structure would push Granovetter into economic sociology, where the same basic question applied to markets and firms.

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• 3. Embedded Markets

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  In 1985, Granovetter published "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness." That article effectively launched what scholars would come to call "new economic sociology." Its central claim was that economic relations between individuals and firms are embedded in actual social networks. They do not exist in an abstract, idealized market. Karl Polanyi had introduced the term "embeddedness" in "The Great Transformation." There, Polanyi argued that all economies are embedded in social relations and institutions. Granovetter took Polanyi's framework and applied it directly to the study of contemporary economic life. Three decades later, he gathered and extended this line of thinking in "Society and Economy," published in 2017.

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• 4. Thresholds and Tipping

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  Thomas Schelling had proposed the threshold model of social behavior first, but Granovetter built the sociological version in detail. His research on fads and riots centers on a hypothetical crowd. Each person's decision to join a riot depends on what everyone else is doing. Some people, the instigators, will act even if no one else does. Others wait until they see a critical number of troublemakers already in motion. That minimum count is each person's threshold. Crucially, these thresholds are not identical across a crowd; they follow a probability distribution. A crowd where thresholds differ only slightly from one person to the next can produce dramatically different outcomes. A tiny shift in who happens to act first may determine whether the group erupts or stays calm. Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell later drew on this framework for "The Tipping Point," bringing the idea to an audience far beyond academic sociology.

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• 5. Institutions and Recognition

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  Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City, New Jersey, produced the class of 1961's valedictorian. Granovetter left New Jersey for Princeton University, where he studied history and graduated in 1965. He then moved to Harvard, where Harrison White supervised his doctoral research in sociology; Granovetter received his PhD in 1970.

  His first faculty position was at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught social relations from 1970 to 1973. Harvard followed, where he rose from assistant to associate professor of sociology. Stony Brook University hired him in 1977; he stayed through 1992 and served as chair of the sociology department in 1989. Northwestern University held him from 1992 to 1995.

  In 1995, Granovetter joined Stanford University. He has held the Joan Butler Ford Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences since at least 2005. He has also chaired Stanford's sociology department twice. In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him a Citation Laureate and placed him on the list of predicted Nobel Prize winners in economics. Six years later, in 2020, the National Academy of Sciences elected him a member. Researchers in capability-based security have since developed what they call "Granovetter diagrams." These diagrams map how ties between objects in a system change over time.

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