Mark Granovetter
Barry Wellman, S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto referred to a message on Mark’s Granovetter honors:
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), one of the
country's oldest honorary learned societies, announced on Monday the
election of 190 new fellows and 22 new foreign honorary members,
including: Mark Granovetter,
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other
scholar-patriots, the academy "honors excellence by electing to
membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent
contributions to their fields, and to the world," academy President
Emilio Bizzi said in a statement. "We are pleased to welcome into the
Academy these new members to help advance our founders' goal of
'cherishing knowledge and shaping the future.'"
Mark Granovetter, the Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of
Humanities and Sciences, is perhaps best known for two papers, "The
Strength of Weak Ties," which argues that weak social relationships
between acquaintances are better for social networking because they can
bridge gaps between more closely knit social groups, and
"Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,"
which argues that all economic activity is intertwined in critical ways
with networks of social relationships. He has been on the
faculty of Stanford's Sociology Department since 1995 and served as the
department chair from 2002 to 2005. For more than 20 years, he has edited
the Cambridge University Press series Structural Analysis in the Social
Sciences. Granovetter is currently working on a book about the sociology
of the economy and is researching the sociology of industrial
organization in Silicon Valley networks and in the
origins and development of the American electricity industry.
Granovetter earned a bachelor's degree in American and modern
European history from Princeton University and a doctorate in
sociology from Harvard University.
Granovetter is a reference for most people studying social capital and social networks. His papers on weak ties have open to most the door to construct those arguments that can explain the real power of networking and knowledge. When reading Mark’s articles I felt that I wished I had written these indeas because in my interest on social networks there was an intuition that things had to work the way Mark explains about weak ties benefit networks. I felt relieved because I sometimes thought my intuition was just imagination and non sense. Science is sometimes so reparing and reconforting to researchers who want to understand better their intuitions after observing real life. Each one of us has a real concern on how our world is working, but evetone has a different way to approach this research. When scientists and professors like Mark Granovetter have been so kind to share with us those important conclusions we feel so conceiled with science that all the efforts to find the clue are compensated.
Even if I don’t know mark, he is part of my personal relations, as a mentor or a guidance in my research.
Thanks Mark and congratulations!
oriol
