Mark Granovetter - Weak ties, living questions, and the history and future of social science

Mark Granovetter has made and remade our understanding of social networks, social theory, collective action, and economic sociology, making and remaking our world in the process. It would not be hyperbole to say that few living scholars have had the influence of Mark Granovetter. 

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In 1995 Mark joined Stanford University as Professor of Sociology, and since 1997 he has been the Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. There he continues his pursuit of a seemingly endless fascination with the way people, social networks, and social institutions interact and shape one another. Across a more than 50 year career he has repeatedly contributed seminal work in these fields and that have been moving forces in numerous other disciplines and intellectual movements. It would be difficult to read Mark's research without finding relevance to your own place in the world.

Among an intimidating list of academic publications and book chapters, he is the author of two of the three most cited papers in Sociology. It is worth pausing to let that sink in--in the entire field of sociology, he has written the first and third most cited papers. Ever.  “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973) and “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness” (1985). Together they have garnered more than 100,000 citations and are annually among the most highly cited papers to this day. Weak tie theory is considered foundational in sociology, taught in most introductory courses and embeddedness is a now a central concept in economic sociology and anthropology.

If those were not enough, Mark also laid the foundations for what is known as 'threshold analysis,' which is theory for when individual's actions will lead to cascades and collective behavior. That theory formed the central academic insights in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

He is also the author of two books. Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers, which came out in 1974, and Society and Economy: Framework and Principles, in 2017. He's now working on a sequel Society and Economy: Cases and Applications.

He's been elected into most major academies you could think of (the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the National Academy of Sciences), and has a list of accolades we could spend the rest of the show listing. 

Mark was a history major at Princeton before completing a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard in 1970.

I have a deep admiration for Mark's work and I'm overwhelmed at the opportunity to ask him a few questions.