In 1973, Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist, introduced the paradoxical idea of “the strength of weak ties.” Granovetter looked at a simple sociological question: How do people with good jobs find those jobs? To answer it, he did something new: he looked at the structure of their social networks. After all, as the cliché goes: it’s not what you know, but who. Granovetter observed that the most irreplaceable social connections were the distant ones. Jobs were often discovered through personal contacts, but not because they were handed out by close friends. Instead, the jobs were rooted
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