Holes in social structure are variably reinforced by the social organization around the hole. The more reinforced the hole, the greater the difficulty in bridging it, but the more likely a successful bridge will carry information novel, and so potentially valuable, to people on the other side. To study how reinforcement varies with access to structural holes, and the achievement associated with...

We develop and test a theory of the origins and consequences of structural holes, using a theoretical framework that argues that network structures emerge from the interplay of two complementary forces: structural constraints and network opportunities. Our data comprises a co-membership network among 501 production teams in the Italian TV industry tracked over a period of 12 years. Using analys...

We are grateful for the thoughtful reactions to our work by Burt, Podolny, and van de Rijt, Ban, and Sarkar (VBS). It is heartening to see that each of the commentators acknowledges the basic insight of our article. And we also appreciate their urging us to clarify the motivation for the model we developed, the assumptions we adopted in building the model, and the model’s implications. We would...

We study the online market for social stock investing where individuals follow other investors in the community for their investment decisions. Using data from kaChing.com, one of the largest social investing marketplaces, we investigate whether and how various aspects of an individual’s social networks affect her investment performance. Using social network methodologies and theories of inform...

The differences in sub-national institutions within large and complex emerging economies have been increasingly noted. Drawing on social network theory and the institution-based view, we argue that two network structural attributes of domestic firms – centrality and structural holes – have distinctive values in different sub-national regions where institutional contexts differ widely. In additi...

A long-standing debate has taken place in the organizational sociology and social network literatures about the relative advantages of network closure versus structural holes in the generation of social capital. There is recent evidence that these advantages differ across cultures and between East Asia and the West in particular, but existing network models are unable to explain why or address ...

In the social sciences, the debate over the structural foundations of social capital has long vacillated between two positions on the relative benefits associated with two types of social structures: closed structures, rich in third-party relationships, and open structures, rich in structural holes and brokerage opportunities. In this paper, we engage with this debate by focusing on the measure...

Friendships with competitors can improve the performance of organizations through the mechanisms of enhanced collaboration, mitigated competition, and better information exchange. Moreover, these benefits are best achieved when competing managers are embedded in a cohesive network of friendships (i.e., one with many friendships among competitors), since cohesion facilitates the verification of ...

As the open source movement grows, it becomes important to understand the dynamics that affect the motivation of participants who contribute their time freely to such projects. One important motivation that has been identified is the desire for formal recognition in the open source community. We investigated the impact of social capital in participants’ social networks on their recognition-base...