Ronald Stuart Burt

Dr.

Mark Granovetter, emeritus professor of sociology at Stanford University; Dr. Ron Burt, professor of management at Bocconi University, and emeritus professor of sociology and strategy at the University of Chicago; Dr. Martin Kilduff, professor of organizational behavior at University College London; and Dr. David Krackhardt, professor of organizations at the Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, with a joint appointment at the Tepper School of Business.

What an honor.

Thank you for being here.

What about social networks made you first believe that understanding networks could fundamentally change how we understand individuals, organizations, and society at large?

Well, I'll start.

Um, Ron has heard this story before, but I can tell you that it's Ron Burt's first book that absolutely converted me from being a, a kind of psychologist with almost a pathological interest in rational behavior to being a networker, and it was a book I read as a draft and I was forced to read in a seminar, and it completely changed my life, turned around my, my whole perspective on, on what social science was about.

And that's because what it did was provided perspec- what I suddenly realized was, in reading his book, which was... had an excellent review of the field i- as one of the chapters, uh, what I realized was that you could ask questions that we could not ordinarily even ask in normal social science, that our vector thinking, our, our way of thinking about statistics, of, of organizing social phenomena was so different from this perspective.

I can make it fit.

I also got an email from Ron Burt today.

He's going to throw in the $25 gift certificates as well for first, second, and third, and they're all for Bass Pro Shops.

Oh, okay.