the study about the communication in Kibbutz I mentioned today in class was acctually not done by Granovetter but by Weimann. Sorry, I confused something there.
The link is unfortunately in German but I am going to summarize the main idea. Weimann observed the communication in Kibbutz and devided the people into three groups: marginals, centrals and others. The centrals are very dominat in the intragroup communication and have - not surprisingly- a lot of strong ties within the group. The marginals are not very important for the intragroup communication but have weak ties to other groups in the Kibbutz and therefore are very important for the intergroup communication. The centrals are so connected within their group that they are not connected with people from other Kibbutz. So the marginals are important to retrieve information from the outside. The type of information was divided in three different groups: romour, news, product information.
Another interesting point is that without the marginals the influence of the centrals would be limited to their own group but through the ties of the marginals to other groups they widen their influence.
In my opinion this study underlines the importance of loose or so called weak ties and that is after all what we often have in social networks. Therefore social networks seem to be the ideal way of retrieving new information.
See you guys
Felix
1 comment:
Great, Felix. Interesting post, good comments. Thanks.
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