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| Name |
Granovetter, Mark |
| Location
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Stanford University |
| Primary Field
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Social and Political Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Economic Sciences |
 Election Citation
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Granovetter studies individual and small-scale interactions to reveal how they cumulate into large-scale society patterns that in turn shape what individuals do. |
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Research Interests
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From the time of his undergraduate studies in History, Mark Granovetter has had a consuming interest in the way that individual and small-scale interaction cumulate into larger-scale societal patterns, and how those patterns affect the smaller scale in turn. His first approach to these questions led him to the analysis of social networks. He showed how weak ties rather than strong serve to bridge different cliques that might otherwise be disconnected, thus conveying information to individuals about jobs, rumors and discoveries about which they might otherwise be unaware. He followed with models of collective behavior, in which small differences in the distribution of individual thresholds for action might lead to huge differences in collective outcomes. His recent book on the social foundations of the economy explores how individual action, trust, social norms and the details of networks accumulate into macro-level outcomes that then shape what individuals do. The second volume of this ongoing work on the economy will use this framework to illuminate the study of such important cases as corruption, corporate governance, organizational form and the emergence of new industries like the American electricity industry and the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley. |
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