人际关系中"弱纽带"比小圈子有用

Start with the theoretical observation first: the most irreplaceable social connections, paradoxically, are often rather weak or distant ones. A family group or clique of close friends all tend to know each other and know similar things at similar times. Their social ties are strong but also redundant, in the sense that there are many different paths through which information could pass from one member of that group to another.
先谈理论观察：最不可取代的社会关系（听上去有点矛盾）往往是相当薄弱或者遥远的关系。家族或朋友圈成员倾向于在圈子内互相结交，他们在同一个时期知道的事情也大致相同。这种社会纽带虽强但也累赘，也就是说，信息在这些圈子内部的传播渠道非常多。

By contrast, “weak ties” between one social cluster and another are valuable precisely because the social contact is unusual. Information passed along a weak tie will often be totally new - and if it doesn't arrive through the weak tie, it is unlikely to arrive at all.
与此形成反差的是，不同社会群体之间的“弱纽带”有价值，正是因为这样的社会联系不寻常。通过弱纽带传递的信息往往是全新的——换言之，如果不通过弱纽带，新信息可能压根传递不过来。

Granovetter then supplemented this theoretical idea with his survey, showing that it was very common for people to find jobs - especially managerial jobs and jobs with which they were satisfied - through personal contacts. The old saw is true: it's not what you know, it's who you know. Or as Granovetter put it in his book Finding a Job, what matters most is “one's position in a social network”.
葛兰诺维特接着通过自己的调查对上述理论进行补充。调查显示，人们常常通过个人关系找到工作（尤其是管理工作，或者是称心如意的工作）。老话说得对：知道什么不重要，认识谁才重要。或套用葛兰诺维特在其著作《怎样找工作》(Finding a Job)中的说法，最重要的是“一个人在社会关系网中的位置”。

But this is not because of crude nepotism: the key contacts who helped job-seekers find jobs were typically distant rather than close friends - old college contacts, perhaps, or former colleagues. Granovetter's analysis made this finding make sense: it's the more peripheral contacts who tell you things you don't already know.
但这不同于赤裸裸的裙带关系：帮助求职者找到工作的关键联系人，一般关系并不密切，算不上老同学、前同事等密友。葛兰诺维特的分析为调查结果提供了合理的解释：比较外围的联系人才能提供你不知道的信息。

More recent research - for instance, a “big data” analysis of millions of mobile phone records conducted by Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others - has backed up Granovetter's argument that the weaker ties are the vital ones.
就拿最近一项研究为例，尤卡-佩卡•翁内拉(Jukka-Pekka Onnela)，奥尔贝特-拉斯洛•鲍劳巴希(Albert-Laszlo Barabasi)等人分析了数以百万计的手机通话记录，用这些“大数据”对葛兰诺维特的观点提供了支持，即弱纽带才是必不可少的。