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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 The Social Structure of Competition -- 2 Formalizing the Argument -- 3 Turning a Profit -- 4 Getting Ahead -- 5 Player-Structure Duality -- 6 Commit and Survive -- 7 Strategic Embedding and Institutional Residue -- Notes -- References -- Index

Ronald Burt describes the social structural theory of competition that has developed through the last two decades. The contrast between perfect competition and monopoly is replaced with a network model of competition. The basic element in this account is the structural hole: a gap between two individuals with complementary resources or information. When the two are connected through a third individual as entrepreneur, the gap is filled, creating important advantages for the entrepreneur. Competitive advantage is a matter of access to structural holes in relation to market transactions.

AbstractFor reasons of social influence and social logistics, people in closed networks are expected to experience time compression: The more closed a person's network, the steeper the person's discount function, and the more narrow the expected time horizon within which the person deliberates events and behavior. Consistent with the hypothesis, data on managers at the top of three organizations show network closure associated with a social life compressed into daily contact with colleagues. Further, language in closed networks is predominantly about current activities, ignoring the future. Further still, discount functions employed by executive MBA students show more severe discounting by students in more closed networks. Inattention to the future can be argued to impair achievement, however, I find no evidence across the managers of daily contact diminishing the achievement associated with network advantage. I close with comments on replication and extrapolation to language more generally, within-person variation, and select cognitive patterns (closure bias, end of history, and felt status loss).

Opinion leaders are, more precisely, opinion brokers who carry information across the social boundaries between groups. They are not people at the top of things so much as people at the edge of things, not leaders within groups so much as brokers between groups. The familiar two-step flow of communication is a compound of two very different network mechanisms: contagion by cohesion through opinion leaders gets information into a group, & contagion by equivalence generates adoptions within the group. Opinion leaders as brokers bear a striking resemblance to network entrepreneurs in social capital research. The complementary content of diffusion & social capital research makes the analogy productive. Diffusion research describes how opinion leaders play their role of brokering information between groups, & social capital research describes the benefits that accrue to brokers. 2 Figures, 41 References. Adapted from the source document.