Why 'Weak Ties' Are Powerful: Talk To Your Barista—Resist Fascism

Lantana camara—or wild sage—and hummingbirds engage in mutualism, where hummingbirds benefit from nectar (food) and plants are pollinated (services).

I am a water baby, an earth mama, a dirtbag traveler. My first teachers were my parents and the natural world around me—the plants and animals and bugs; the sky and her clouds; the rocks and the beloved dirt. All of it. I have also been highly educated in the conventional sense and have benefitted greatly from my education. It nurtured and channeled my ceaseless curiosity, provided me a mental encyclopedia describing how the natural world functions, helped me think critically, taught me how to solve complex problems, honed my ability to apply a systems lens to the world.

At the same time, I also see the myriad ways this formal system is failing us, molding us to fit into the matrix of knowledge workers, feeding the system—a system that leaves other ways of knowing by the sidelines and in doing so, challenges our wellbeing, making us anxious, isolated, depressed, physically unwell. Not to mention that it comes with a price tag similar to the GDP of a small nation. I feel fortunate to have been able to leverage my formal education to explore the world, her natural systems, her peoples, to largely escape this conventional matrix. I know not everyone is so fortunate.

That said, I’ve been following the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education with horror. (There’s so much horror each and every day that I continue to titrate my media exposure; however, this particular issue is near and dear to my heart.) So, yes, there are problems, but no, dismantling cultures of critical thinking, advanced knowledge development, crucial primary research, respect for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and freedom of expression is 1000% not the answer. Don’t even get me started.

Like many, I was incredibly relieved when Harvard University stood up and gave Trump the hand (Oh my god, somebody is doing something!). Hundreds of universities have followed suit, with more than 500 university administrators signing a joint letter condemning the administration’s interference. This effort was followed by that of two Rutgers University professors who drafted a “mutual defense compact” for Big Ten schools. (And, yes, I did what little I could by signing a petition against the decision by the President of Dartmouth College—my alma mater—to refrain from signing the joint letter. WTAF.)

A New York Times piece covering the compact talked of the networks that are emerging in and between universities in response to the threats to education. In addition to the written statements of solidarity and the defense compact, this includes a 60-person group chat where officials from “community colleges, large research universities and Ivy League schools are now sharing information”.

Professor Michael Yarbrough, who teaches about law, society, and social justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, in speaking of these growing networks, evoked the sociological theory of the strength of weak ties. This reference caught my attention for I had learned of the theory in previous work with a Ph.D. sociologist. It got me thinking about the power of networks and the implications for resiliency—for our families and communities, our democracy, our natural world.

The theory originated 50 years ago with a seminal paper, The Strength of Weak Ties¹, by sociologist Mark Granovetter, Ph.D., now at Stanford University. Granovetter’s work demonstrated that “a person’s weak ties—their casual connections and loose acquaintances—were more helpful than their strong ones in securing employment.” Because weak ties tend to bridge different social circles, they expose individuals to a wider range of information and opportunities than do ties with close friends and family. Essentially, they provide greater access to novel perspectives and information outside immediate social bubbles.

In the 50 years since publication, this paper has become a classic in the social science literature, and has been disseminated more broadly to shape thinking on business, economics, psychology, physics, computer science, epidemiology, and more. It’s been cited nearly 70,000 times.

Here are a just few examples of the ways in which the theory has been applied to understand a wide spectrum of interactions: Studies have shown that regular interaction with weaker ties (acquaintances, neighbors, coworkers, etc.) are associated with better mental health.² Other research has demonstrated that structural inequalities in modern societies are related to the availability of weak ties, with evidence suggesting peoples excluded from broad, diverse weak-tie networks—often due to economic or spatial marginalization—often face systemic disadvantages in employment, social mobility, and access to information.³ Still other work suggests that high liability concentration in financial networks (i.e., where a few institutions hold large exposures) increases systemic risk, producing greater vulnerability to cascading failures (think the Lehman Brothers investment bank bankruptcy and the related U.S. financial crisis of 2008), relative to dispersed, low-concentration (i.e., weak) ties, which reduce systemic losses by preventing the formation of fragile, tightly-coupled risk clusters.⁴

Most familiar to me is the application of the theory in ecosystem ecology, where it’s been applied to mutualistic networks and to food webs. (In ecology, mutualism is a type of symbiotic relationship in which two or more species interact in a way—often exchanging nutrients and services—that benefits all participants. Examples include nutrient exchange between fungi and vascular plants, fertilization of flowering plants by pollinators, and nitrogen fixation by bacteria in leguminous plants.) In mutualistic networks, weak interactions often link species that are not otherwise strongly connected. By providing alternative pathways for interaction, these weak ties ensure that the failure of a single species does not lead to systemic collapse. Similarly, our understanding of food webs suggests that weak trophic interactions—that is low-interaction predator-prey relationships—play a pivotal role in maintaining ecosystem stability by dampening the effects of strong interactions that might otherwise produce cascading extinctions. In both cases, weak ties are critical for resiliency and biodiversity.

As much as there are innumerable reasons to despair right now, I see the strength in community—connection not with just those closest to us but within our larger communities, our weak ties—as reason for hope, as a source of joy, as a means to resist. We are made happier, healthy, and stronger when we connect to others—both similar and dissimilar to us. We fill ourselves emotionally; we increase our access to information, to helping hands, to mutuality in resources and responsibilities; and as the universities are demonstrating, together we grow our capacity to resist.

I send this out as a clarion call to get off-line, get into life, and intentionally act to strengthen the weak ties in your world. To make time and space to interact with the barista who smiles as she serves you coffee, to help the older man get across the street, to ask your neighbor for advice when you need it. As Maya Angelou famously said: In diversity, there is beauty and there is strength.

And, goddess knows we need strength right now.

What are the ways in which weak ties add to your life? Please share with us!

xo, Wendy

1. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392

2. Kim, H. H.-s. (2017). “Strength of Weak Ties,” Neighborhood Ethnic Heterogeneity, and Depressive Symptoms among Adults: A Multilevel Analysis of Korean General Social Survey (KGSS) 2012. Social Sciences, 6(2), 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6020065

3. See, for example: Zenou, Y. (2011). Spatial versus social mismatch: The strength of weak ties. Social Science Research Network. https://ftp.iza.org/dp5507.pdf

4. Chen, Peng-Chu. (2016). Systemic risk in financial networks. Open Access Dissertations. 743. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/743