Mark Granovetter

Mark Granovetter (born October 20, 1943) is an American sociologist and professor at Stanford University. Granovetter was recently recognized as a Citation Laureate by Thomson Reuters and added to that organization’s list of predicted Nobel Prize winners in economics for the year 2014. Data from the Web of Science show that Granovetter has written both the first and third most cited sociology articles. He is best known for his work in social network theory and in economic sociology, particularly his theory on the spread of information in social networks known as "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1973).

Granovetter earned an A.B. in History at Princeton University (1965) and a Ph.D in Sociology at Harvard University (1970). At Harvard he studied under the supervision of Harrison White. He is currently the Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and is the chair of the Department of Sociology. He worked at Northwestern University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Johns Hopkins University.

Granovetter's paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" is a highly influential research, with about 37,000 citations according to Google Scholar (by March 2016). In 1969 Granovetter submitted it to American Sociological Review, but it was rejected. One of the reviewers stated: "...it should not be published. I respectfully submit the following among an endless series of reasons that immediately came to mind"; the other added: "... I find that his scholarship is somewhat elementary.. [he] has confined himself to a few older and obvious items". Eventually this pioneering research was published in 1973 in American Journal of Sociology and became the most cited work in the Social Sciences. In marketing, information science, or politics, weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. The concepts and findings of this work were later published in the monograph Getting A Job, an adaptation of Granovetter's doctoral dissertation at Harvard University's Department of Social Relations, with the title: "Changing Jobs: Channels of Mobility Information in a Suburban Population" (313 pages).

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