The Importance Of Social Network Theory

Social network theory asserted that social structures where actors located would determine what they found and get from relations (Granovetter, 1985). Some studies pointed out two fundamental networking strategies and explored structural effects on collective actions. As social actors are embedded in densely connected networks as subgroups or cliques, social cohesiveness derive from frequent interactions and communication; and in the meanwhile homogeneity and unity would be developed due to mutual accepted norms of behavior (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). Building densely connected networks, so called as strong ties, is an expression action based on the principle of homophily; its structural advantage is to maintain and reinforce existing resources

Under this situation, actors do not seek partners with similar attributes, but bridge others for the sake of prestige or resources. Adopting the bridging strategy offers an access to broader and heterogeneous resources (Lin, 2002). As a result, as actors in low social status connect with ones in higher level, this kind of instrumental action would contribute to gains in upper-reachable social resources, such as authority or endorsement (Lin, 2002). Notice that as two segregated groups are connected on account of a common partner, the broker would have capacities to control the direction of resources flow and quickly response to the demand from the environment (Andrew & Carr, 2013). With various sources of information from organizations in the upper level, empirical data showed that the bridging strategy would enhance local governments’ abilities of disaster resilience (Jung & Song, 2015). The implication is that weak ties or structure holes are preferable types of partners for actors who opt to search the opportunities for mutual gains between heterogeneous partners, (Scholz et al., 2008); maximize efficiency and novelty of resources exchange(Feiock et al., 2012) and increase their power to control resources and make