The Strength Of Ties And Social Capital

This study is a preliminary and exploratory empirical study around the debate on the argument of the strength of ties proposition.In the field of social capital research,the proposition of the strength of ties comes to two completely opposite conclusions,that is,strong ties or weak ties is more conducive to the acquisition of professional status.The central idea of Granovetter's argument is that the weak ties between individual actors serves as a bridge,which opens up channels for information resources to circulate from social circles different from their own,and the information resources obtained through weak ties increase the opportunities for work flow.In the macro-structure of hierarchical pyramid,Lin Nan thinks that people who are linked to high status through weak ties will get more diversified information resources and some influence,thus improving the possibility of obtaining professional status.Bian Yanjie believes that strong ties act as a bridge to link to high-ranking associates,which will bring substantial help to job seekers' professional status.According to the research perspective of job seekers such as Lin Nan,Snijders pays attention to the related people in the process of interaction,and judges whether to make a decision to provide resources or help by the behavior of job seekers;Smith investigated and analyzed the poor black community with low human capital and employment difficulties from the perspective of related individual.The decision making behavior of related individual to provide help is usually measured by their reputation;Marin focused on analyzing information holders with certain human capital reserves.They will selectively share and transmit information according to different the strength of ties,and control the flow of information resources to different the strength of ties.However,there are conditions for these information resources to flow to different the strength of ties.Based on the theoretical perspective of the conditional source of social capital,and puts forward the research question of what factors affect/constrain the related individual's decision-making to provide help besides the strength of ties as one of the conditional sources in the job-seeking process.Qualitative case studies are used to collect relevant information in the event process through in-depth interviews.In this process,people pay attention to how to make decisions to help,and analyze the conditions in the process and the influencing factors of associates decisions.After case analysis of the interview materials obtained,this study draws the following conclusions:First of all,under different relationship dimensions,the distinguished the strength of ties proposition,especially in the emotional sense,affects the decision-making of the related person,and the willingness and tendency in obtaining the resources of the related person may be one of the necessary conditions;Secondly,the strong "emotional" factors in the strong ties encourage the related people to have more decision-making motivation to provide help,and the connotation of human feelings,face,trust and reciprocity may affect the decision-making of providing resource heterogeneity as sufficient(unnecessary)conditions;Thirdly,the trust level between the weak ties job seeker and the related person is the necessary condition to encourage the related person to make a positive decision to help the job seeker's request;Finally,in the strong and weak ties,maintaining a good reputation in the working environment has an important influence on the behavior of recommendation decision-making.