Weak Ties

Weak ties are the social connections that bridge otherwise disconnected groups, first identified by Mark Granovetter in his 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties." Granovetter's counterintuitive finding was that weak ties — acquaintances, distant colleagues, casual contacts — are more valuable than strong ties for accessing novel information and opportunities. Strong ties bind dense clusters where everyone knows the same things; weak ties connect these clusters, carrying information across structural holes in the social network.

The empirical evidence for the weak ties hypothesis is robust in labor markets but contested in other domains. Digital social networks may have altered the information value of weak ties by making them too numerous and too shallow — a network saturation problem that Granovetter could not have anticipated. The concept remains foundational to social capital theory, where weak ties constitute bridging capital.