The research examined individual differences in people’s propensity to connectwith others (PCO). Ameasure of PCO, with components for making friends (strong ties), making acquaintances (weak ties), and joining others (bridging ties), was developed and tested in two studies involving 144 undergraduates and 197 health-care employees. PCO and its components were significantly positively associated...

In contrast to recent US studies showing a decrease in core network size, our Kenyan data reveals substantial network growth. We attribute this to the diffusion of mobile telephones. Results from pooled survey data from Nairobi professionals and entrepreneurs in 2002 and 2007 as well as qualitative interviews from 2007 to 2009 show virtual saturation in the diffusion of phones during this perio...

Previous research has shown that spending money on others (prosocial spending) increases happiness. But, do the happiness gains depend on who the money is spent on? Sociologists have distinguished between strong ties with close friends and family and weak ties--relationships characterized by less frequent contact, lower emotional intensity, and limited intimacy. We randomly assigned participant...

In this work, we challenge the assumption that weak ties play uniquely important social support roles on network sites, particularly regarding informational support. To overcome methodological limitations of earlier research, present a mixed-methods study. Forty-one participants were interviewed and asked to identify five weak, medium, strong each report perceived actually received (emotional, ...

We consider the Stable Marriage Problem and the Stable Roommates Problem in presence of ties and incomplete preference lists. They can be solved by centralized algorithms, but this requires to make public preference lists, something that members would prefer to avoid for privacy reasons. This motivates a distributed formulation to keep privacy. We propose a distributed constraint approach that ...

Based on more than 14 months' ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that ...

Although Knowledge has grown to occupy a major role in the discussion on firm performance, we currently know little about the micro-processes involved in search and transfer of knowledge. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in a large, multinational professional service firm, we identify a frequent phenomenon in which employees successfully extend ties to unacquainted others, bypassing direct and in...

This article contributes to the literature on network strategies and institutional transitions in emerging economies in Asia by identifying a realistic, intermediate phase between the early and late phases of institutional transitions suggested by Peng (2003). Focusing on the intermediate phase, we advance two arguments based on network strength and network content. First, in terms of network s...