SOC483Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Georg Simmel, Mark Granovetter, Environmental Factor
Document Summary
Structural holes do everything good, message of most burt articles, including encourage innovation. Burt"s study- to figure out they are good for coming up with good ideas, he asked people what their networks were, and asked what their best idea was for improving the supply chain. He took ideas and had managers rate how good the ideas were. He discovered people with more structural holes have better rated ideas. 4 levels of brokerage: simplest- make people on both sides of a structural hole aware of interests and difficulties in the other group. Those that communicate these issues between groups are important because so much conflict results from misunderstandings: transferring best practice, to draw analogies between groups ostensibly irrelevant to one another, synthesis (pg. 8) likely to see new beliefs by combining elements. Higher company performance when top managers have boundary-spanning relationships beyond their firm. More innovation, creativity good to establish alliances with firms outside their own area.
