Mark Granovetter (1973,1982,1983) discovered that people find out about good jobs through word of mouth from distant acquaintances. Network theory
Information flows through loose networks of people who do not know each other well. Relatives and friends are of limited help because they know about the same information as you do. Weak ties indicate the two people are in different social locations, so they have access to different flows of information. In chance meetings, your old acquaintances can tell you about new openings at their firms that require the skills you possess.
This network perspective offers one reason African Americans who attend interracial schools as children get better jobs than comparable African Americans who attend all-black schools. This explanation does not require that the blacks actually learned more in the interracial schools, or even had particularly close white friends.
Conventional wisdom, a less polite term for common sense, often leads one astray in understanding the complexities of social life.
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