Structural Holes and Good Ideas

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Sociology.http://www.jstor.org Ronald S. Burt University of ChicagoThis article outlines the mechanism by which brokerage provides social capital. Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Brokerage across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of options otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage becomes social capital. I review evidence consistent with the hypothesis, then look at the networks around managers in a large American electronics company. The organization is rife with structural holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates. Compensation, positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable. I close with implications for creativity and structural change.The hypothesis in this article is that people who stand near the holes in a social structure are at higher risk of having good ideas. The argument is that opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alter- native ways of thinking and behaving, which gives them more options to select from and synthesize. New ideas emerge from selection and synthesis across the structural holes between groups. Some fraction of those new ideas are good. "Good" will take on specific meaning with empirical data, but for the moment, a good idea broadly will be understood to be one that people praise and value.Novelty is not a feature of this hypothesis. It is familiar in the sociological theory of Simmel ([1922] 1955) on conflicting group affiliations or Merton ([1948] 1968a, [1957] 1968c) on role sets and serendipity in science. The hypothesis is so broadly familiar, in fact, that one can see it in the remarks of prominent creatives. For example, discussing commerce and manners, Adam Smith ([1766] 1982, p. 539) noted that "when the mind is employed about a variety of objects it is some how expanded and enlarged." Swedberg (1990, p. 3) begins his book on academics working the boundary between economics and sociology with John Stuart Mills's ([1848] 1987, p. 581) opinion that "it is hardly possible to overrate the value . . . of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unl...

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