Research about the impact of social networks on an industry

Doing some research the weekend on another topic I found that actually most universities have nice homepages about their research and studies in different areas. So I decided to google some of the “big name” universities to see what they have on their homepages regarding our topic.
The university homepage and its social sciences department I found most helpful was Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/faculty.html).
The link above brings you directly to their staff of the Sociology Faculty … and this gives you direct access to some really interesting articles these guys published.
The article I found by far most interesting and I strongly recommend you to read is “Social Networks in Silicon Valley”, which was co-written by our old friend Granovetter.
The article analyses why the Silicon Valley companies have been so successful and links their success to the strong social networks they have within this region: “The most crucial aspect of Silicon Valley is its networks.”
What I liked very much about this article is that it points out that social networks can be the main driver for the success of an industry, in this case in a special region.
By applying theory to a well known example this article helped me very much to understand the advantages strong social networks can have: not only in regard to the success of a single company, but a whole industry. Further it shows that not only companies benefit but also individuals, i.e. by having access to an extremely well linked labour market.


This link brings you directly to the article about Silicon Valley: (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/mgranovetter/documents/gransocnetsilvalley_000.pdf)
(Don’t let the size of the article scare you. Its actually just 30 pages with really big letters, and reading parts of it is already useful.)