Relational capital: ‘It’s not how many people you know that matters: it’s how they’re willing to help’
More contacts do not necessarily mean a better network: the secret lies in the ‘gaps’ that connect different worlds and ideas. From Dunbar’s number to Marissa King’s research (Yale): why the structure of a network explains income, success and creativity, and why you don’t need to be an extrovert to build one – just method, practice and awareness.
For decades, we have measured relational capital in the same way as one might count a collection of ‘stickers’: the more we have, the better. Network science tells a different, less intuitive story: what matters is not just the people we know and the trust we have built with them, but how they are connected and arranged in relation to one another.
The starting point is a figure that has become well known: 150. It was proposed by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the early 1990s: a threshold of around 150 meaningful relationships, in concentric circles of 5, 15, 50 and 150 people, ranging from a few close friends to increasingly wider and less intimate circles. Social networks have multiplied the number of contacts, but not our ability to nurture them. Simply accumulating them, therefore, is not enough: we need something extra.
The first turning point came in 1973, when the sociologist Mark Granovetter published ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ in the *American Journal of Sociology*. By studying people who had changed jobs in the Boston area, he discovered a paradox: crucial information rarely came from close friends – who move in the same circles and know the same things – but rather from acquaintances seen only occasionally.
Weak ties are bridges to worlds we have never explored – a true ‘blue ocean’. In 2022, the essay was confirmed on an unprecedented scale: a study published in *Science*, with Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral among the authors, tracked around 20 million LinkedIn users over a five-year period. The finding is that moderately weak ties are the most useful for changing jobs, more so than very strong ties or those that are virtually non-existent.
Another key contribution comes from Ronald Burt of the Booth School of Business in Chicago. In ‘Structural Holes’ (1992), he argues that the value of a network lies in the gaps between groups that do not communicate with one another: the ‘structural holes’. Those who bridge these gaps – the ‘brokers’ – are the first to spot opportunities and control the flow of information. In a 2004 study of managers at a large industrial group, Burt demonstrated that those who connect separate groups put forward better ideas and receive higher performance ratings, remuneration and promotions. In short, one’s position within the network is by no means insignificant.
