Exercise 3 solution

Who is more likely to know of a job Maya has not heard of: the former classmate she meets once a year.

Why, using the chapter's account of Granovetter: the Strength of Weak Ties page says weak ties (acquaintances not reinforced by many mutual friendships) are "pivotal in the flow of information" and can reach audiences that strong ties cannot. Maya's five closest friends all work in the same hospital, so they are likely to know the same people and hear the same news she does. The classmate moves in a different circle and works at a firm she has never heard of, so she is a likely route to non-redundant information, which is the Social network page's description of what spans a structural hole. The step from this to "friends probably hold the same information" is my own reasoning (check).

Two things the chapter says the page does not tell us:
1. It does not report the job-search data or any numbers from the study (so we cannot say how many people actually found work through acquaintances).
2. It has no criticism section (its citation count, over 78,000 as of November 2025, shows influence, not that the claim is correct).
(Also acceptable: the page defines weak ties but does not compare them with strong ties in detail.)

The parallel with the iron law of oligarchy: Michels's idea is famous and sounds like a law, but the page lists critics (Cassinelli, Rustow, Ober, Leach) who disagree with it and studies with mixed results (Lipset's typographers' union resisted oligarchy). A famous idea needs checking against evidence and against its critics, however neat it sounds. The same applies to the weak-ties advice.