A P R I L 2 012
Marshall Van Alstyne (Boston University)
Why Strong Ties
Matter More In a
Fast-Changing
Environment
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MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
Why StrongTies Matter
More In a Fast-Changing
Environment
It has become accepted wisdom that weak ties — your acquaintances,
distant colleagues — can provide more novel information than close
ties. But new research by Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor at
Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, suggests that in
some cases strong ties are better.
MARSHALL VAN ALSTYNE (BOSTON UNIVERSITY), INTERVIEWED DAVID KIRON
W
ho should you go to for the best information? And how much do
you want to share your information?
Those are some of the essential questions about knowledge management that continue to be asked both by researchers and by
executives. Those questions have become particularly interesting
in the past five years with the rise of social media that makes it
faster than ever to share information and easier than ever to reconnect with hundreds, if not thousands, of people from your past.
Marshall van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, is in the thick
of it.
“My original training was computer science, followed in grad school by managerial economics at Yale then
MIT,” says van Alstyne. “I studied information productivity, social networks, and information flows in organizations to see if we could figure out what it is that makes people more productive.”
Van Alstyne ran a five-year National Science Foundation study, tracking information flows and e-mail and
what makes individual knowledge workers more productive. He also does research on platform economics,
what he calls “the creation of ecosystems involving lots of users and developers such as the platform developed by Apple.” Lately, he's at work on a new study funded by an NSF grant on the creation of knowledge
marketplaces.
“You can think of knowledge markets as crowdsourcing, but our particular twist on it is the economic optimization of crowdsourcing, applying economic theory to these social science properties,” he says. “How can
we get better answers, get higher rates of contribution? How can we do better resource allocation? Can we
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value the information shared? Can we cause economic growth inside an information economy? Those are
our areas.”
In a conversation with David Kiron, executive editor of Innovation Hubs at MIT Sloan Management Review,
Van Alstyne explains how some of his new research challenges the existing theory about the value of strong
ties versus weak ties, and why we should beware of “interrupt-driven communication.”
The original answer provided by Mark Granovetter
[now at Stanford University] was, well, possibly by a
weak tie, meaning an acquaintance rather than a
friend. The reason was that strong ties are likely to
be redundant. They’ll have the same information,
so you’re not going to find out about new job opportunities. That is an extremely heavily cited
paper. I think it’s got something like 14,000 to
16,000 citations; it’s one of the most famous papers
in sociology. [See “The Strength of Weak Ties”,
American Journal of Sociology, Volume 78, Issue 6
(May 1973), 1360-1380. Download the PDF at
http://mitsmr.com/HimKUl.]
In the social business survey that MIT Sloan
Management Review conducted recently
with Deloitte, we saw a big industry variance in the perceived value of social tools.
Energy and utilities, for instance, score low,
while the entertainment, media and communication industries tend to have a much
higher valuation.
I haven’t studied those industry sectors, per se, but
I’ll offer some speculation on this. I’m going to
guess that you have a relatively stable, non-changing environment in the older industries such as
energy, and you have much higher update, much
faster clock speed, much higher volatility in the enter t ainment and infor mat ion technolog y
industries. When information is changing so fast,
it’s the recency of information that may matter
more, so you need constant updates. This might
explain why social media are more valuable in one
industry and less valuable in another.
Yet Ron Burt [now at The University of Chicago
Booth School of Business] subsequently refined
that theory with a theory of structural holes, arguing that, it’s probably not the strength of the tie
that’s critical. What’s really making the difference is
bridging the boundary between two different groups
that have different information. It’s bridging a
structural hole that might make the biggest difference, and there’s where you might get novel
information.
Let me give you a reason why I think that might be
the case. Are you familiar with the weak ties literature and the structural holds literature in social
networks?
A colleague, Sinan Aral, and I just published research
in the American Journal of Sociology that reinterprets
a lot of that theory and gets a completely different
finding. [See http://mitsmr.com/HgUQIe.]
I am, but it would be great if you could go
over it for our readers.
Let me give you some of the original theory, and
then describe the work that we have just published
in a different context.
Your new research reinterprets Granovetter
and Burt? How?
All we do is we re-ask the question in a slightly different way. Rather than asking, “where do you get
the most novel information?” we asked, “where do
you get the most novel information per unit time?”
If the environment is stable, you get exactly the
original answer of Burt and Granovetter.
The original social network theory went after the
question, “Where do you find novel information?”
And, specifically, "Can novel information help you
find a job? How should you go about doing that?"
These are great questions.
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But if, on the other hand, the environment updates
constantly, you can get the opposite answer of Burt
and Granovetter. In fact, you might want a close,
cohesive, strong tie that’s constantly updating you
with novel information. We found three reasons for
this.
heterogeneous. Yet, the original theory is incorrect
if the environment is constantly updating, if the information space is very large and very deep, or if it’s
the case that everyone knows the same thing. It’s
basically a tradeoff between topological diversity
versus high volume bandwidth that determines
how much novel information you receive.
Reason number one is that if the environment
changes so rapidly, then you can go back to the
same person and learn something new or different.
You can imagine stock traders would be a great example. The environment is updating constantly, so
their arbitrage opportunities are updating very fast.
This element is frequency of change.
That is really interesting.
So just to close the loop, this tradeoff could explain
the differing results in your study with Deloitte. It's
likely that the original theory applies in the case of
energy and utilities, where the value of social media
was low, while the new theory applies in the case of
entertainment, media, and communications, where
the value of social media was high.
Reason number two applies in a renaissance knowledge context. Maybe you’ve got someone who
knows so much that you can go back to the same
person and talk to them about botany, you can talk
to them about chemistry, you can talk to them
about politics, you can talk to them about, religion,
art and music. In any given time increment, you
will not have exhausted the knowledge of a renaissance scholar, and you can go back and talk to them
about something different. This second element is
breadth of knowledge or the size of the information
space.
You mentioned stock broker arbitrage as an
example when you were discussing frequency of change. I noticed in another paper
you have where you mentioned a situation
where there’s a fast changing job market.
Could you tell that example?
Thanks for reminding me. So, the original question
asked by Granovetter was, “where might you find a
job?” And Granovetter’s original answer was,
maybe from a weak tie, because the information
would be non-redundant.
Reason number three is the uniformity of knowledge distributed over the whole population. If
everyone knows the same thing, no amount of
structural diversity whatsoever can increase the
amount of novelty you’ll receive. In which case, the
only thing you care about is bandwidth, which is
getting as much volume from a single person as you
can during any interval of time. In which case,
you’re back to a cohesive, close or local tie.
If you look at the broader theory, that may or may
not hold. It may also be the case that you have to
ask, “Is this information recent, or is it stale?”
Consider two different job opportunities. One is a
great opportunity, one is a lousy opportunity. The
great opportunity will disappear because it’s a job
everyone wants. The lousy job will stay open longer
because it’s a job no one wants.
So, by re-asking the original question slightly differently, “where do you get the most novel
information per unit time?” you get a fundamentally different answer than the original paper. We
tested this set of theories using e-mail data we had
gathered for a study of IT and productivity, and
found that yes, you can get that property. The original theory is correct if the environment is stable, the
information space is narrow, or the distribution
Now if you go to a close tie, a friend who knows you
really well, someone who is not necessarily bridging a structural hole, they may be interested in
pushing that information to you because they have
your interests at heart. Whereas if it’s a remote tie
across a structural hole or it’s a weak tie, you may
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have to go ask them for that information, in which
case, by the time you’ve gotten it, it’s already stale.
One of my favorite stories is from an information
sharing environment at SAP. SAP, of course, is the
large enterprise resource planning, ERP systems,
company.
So it really depends on the nature of the information you need. If it’s information that’s really time
sensitive, you may need to rely on people who are
looking out for you rather than people who are remote from you. Even in the original context, the
idea that your close ties may be better sources of
novelty is very important, because in this case it’s
time sensitive.
They built a developer ecosystem where developers
can answer each other’s questions. Before the introduction of this system, a value added reseller on top
of SAP’s software had no particular reason to help
out another value added reseller. As a matter of fact,
one might not want to answer the question of a
competitor because it might make them more competitive.
What do you say to the basic resistance
some people have to using social media for
their ties? We’ve heard this — that knowledge is a source of power, and that opening
up and sharing that knowledge can undermine that self-conception.
But after the introduction of this question and answer marketplace, things shifted completely. Now
you earn points in proportion to the value of your
answers. Now it’s the case that value added resellers
are telling their employees to go in and answer the
questions of other value added resellers to prove,
hey, we’re the ones with the expertise, not those
guys. It’s completely shifted the incentives. Folks are
now pushing their information into the marketplace. And it happens in a way that benefits SAP.
My answer is to think of the difference between information scarcity and information abundance.
Before the introduction of lots of these technologies, certain information was scarce. You, as the
control point for access to that information, would
have a lot of power. You would have a lot of benefit.
It’s a really clever mechanism that completely inverts the incentives from one of hoarding to one of
information sharing.
In contrast, when information is abundant and it’s
easy to go around you, you can benefit by being the
facilitator. You can benefit by being the broker. You
can benefit by being the first to provide that information or by being an easy to work with source.
Where are the management lessons from
your research and the SAP example that are
most useful for a manager thinking about
implementing some kind of social software
initiative, like something around idea generation?
It’s that information abundance that I think will really shift the mindset. If you’re not participating,
someone else may be able to provide that information. Even if it’s not quite as good, someone else can
provide it a lot earlier and in such abundance that
other folks are still happy to have it. It’s almost like
an intellectual property regime where you get the
reputation benefit of having been first. If you come
in third, fourth or fifth, maybe you have somewhat
better information, but, by that time folks have already passed you by.
One is that you absolutely will be able to get better
idea diversity by approaching large populations, by
crowdsourcing. My favorite example comes from a
situation that played out at Princeton University
with its student government, but it’s directly analogous for almost any manager.
The student government was trying to figure out
how to spend their budget, so they generated about
100 of their own favorite ideas. Then they submitted the ideas to a student vote, but allowed the
Where have you seen a shift in this mindset
at a corporate level?
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students to add their own ideas. And three of the
top five ideas ended up not even anticipated in the
original list of the elected student officials.
interrupt you constantly, it can dramatically reduce
your productivity.
How did they study it?
So one of the first lessons is that you can use crowdsourcing to not only get diversity, but also to choose
priority, and do a fairly good job of that.
Well, they ran laboratory experiments. They gave
folks tasks or problems to solve, and they found that
allowing yourself to be interrupted all the time, as
opposed to focusing on the task and barring interruption, was roughly equivalent to pulling an
all-nighter. It’s almost as if you didn’t get any sleep at
all that represents the relative loss of effectiveness.
Another lesson, of course, is to realize when to apply
the old versus new theories. There is a diversity-bandwidth tradeoff. The faster paced the environment, the
more strong social networks matter.
You need to batch your time on task. You really
need a focused hour to two hours uninterrupted by
instant messaging and phones and texts and Twitter
feeds.
You’ve studied e-mail for years, and its role
in social networking. Most people can’t
stand it.
Well, I like the technologies that give me control,
and I'm cautious allowing interrupt-driven communication. E-mail is useful among the different
criteria, such as having a conversation back and
forth. There are lots of criteria. Can you interact, or
is it just broadcast? Can you find what you need
easily? Is the search good? Can you connect your
communication streams to your task streams? Is
your communication flow, be it e-mail or Twitter or
blogs, connected to your other information management tools, your documents, your task lists,
your co-workers?
One point we haven’t touched on that’s worth mentioning is that social tools are also being used a lot
by companies to eavesdrop on conversations they
never had access to before. Companies are obviously scanning Twitter feeds and Facebook and
things like that to see what others are saying about
them, so they’re able to eavesdrop on conversations
that they couldn’t hear previously, and that’s occurring inside and outside the organization.
That begs another question, which is that
the freedom and the opportunity to give
voice to your opinions does come with that
kind of a downside.The price of freedom is
eternal vigilance. Do you have a perspective
on that tradeoff?
All of those — the flow rates, the interruptions, the
interactivity — really do matter, and the greater the
integration, the easier it is to use any given tool. I
mean, in a garden you pick the best tool for the task,
right? You don’t plant small, delicate flowers with a
backhoe. You do excavate with one when you're
building. Pick the tool for the task. E-mail is good
for some things; Twitter and Facebook are good for
other things.
I do. I think in general, companies need to respect
their users more with respect to their privacy and
what firms are observing versus what they’re offering.
On the one hand, if it’s a Twitter feed and you know
that you’re putting it out there publicly, analysis of
any of that is, of course, fair game, and companies
could, and probably should, be doing that kind of
research.
I think as everyone has experienced, you can get
too much information, you get too many distractions. There’s a marvelous study I came across from
some researchers in England with Hewlett-Packard, where they examined interrupt-driven
communications. If you allow some of these social
technologies like Twitter or Facebook or others to
On the other hand, if it’s private communications,
and e-mail is among the channels for which you
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have some credible belief that you’re sharing it with
a smaller, more select group — for example, many
folks have elected to share only some of their newsfeeds with some contacts — then for the firm to
abrogate that trust and then, via analysis, share that
with third parties, is probably an abuse of the privacy. I think firms need to be more vigilant about
respecting the privacy of their users on those occasions when they have a reasonable expectation of
privacy. I'm already seeing some backlash.
A director at HP research labs told me a great story
that her daughter had just re-friended her on Facebook. Since they were already connected, the
director asked why her daughter was connecting all
over again. The daughter shrugged and said she
was tired of being spied upon by all the apps on
Facebook so she'd created a new account just to get
rid of them.
And yet, often it is the case that customers say they
want privacy, but too often they’ll part with their
profile information for a discount off of milk and
eggs — you know, a twenty cent coupon. So what
people say and what they do can sometimes be two
different things.
David Kiron is executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review's Innovation Hubs.
This interview was conducted as part of a social
business research initiative that MIT Sloan Management Review is conducting in collaboration with
Deloitte.
Reprint 53401.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012.
All rights reserved.
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