AJS Volume 110 Number 2 (September 2004): 349–99 349

2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0002-9602/2004/11002-0004$10.00
Structural Holes and Good Ideas
1
Ronald S. Burt
University of Chicago
This article outlines the mechanism by which brokerage provides
social capital. Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within
than between groups, so people connected across groups are more
familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Brokerage
across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of op-
tions otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage
becomes social capital. I review evidence consistent with the hy-
pothesis, then look at the networks around managers in a large
American electronics company. The organization is rife with struc-
tural holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates.Compensation,
positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are
disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span
structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to ex-
press ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to
have ideas evaluated as valuable. I close with implications for cre-
ativity and structural change.
The hypothesis in this article is that people who stand near the holes in
a social structure are at higher risk of having good ideas. The argument
is that opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between
groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alter-
1
Portions of this material were presented as the 2003 Coleman Lecture at theUniversity
of Chicago, at the Harvard-MIT workshop on economic sociology, in workshops at
the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of
Kentucky, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Stanford Graduate School of Business,
the University of Texas at Dallas, Universiteit Utrecht, and the “Social Aspects of
Rationality” conference at the 2003 meetings of the American Sociological Association.
I am grateful to Christina Hardy for her assistance on the manuscript and to several
colleagues for comments affecting the final text: William Barnett, James Baron, Jon-
athan Bendor, Jack Birner, Matthew Bothner, Frank Dobbin, Chip Heath, Rachel
Kranton, Rakesh Khurana, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Joel Podolny, Holly Raider, James Rauch,
Don Ronchi, Ezra Zuckerman, and two AJS reviewers. I am especially grateful to
Peter Marsden for his comments as discussant at the Coleman Lecture. Direct cor-
respondence to Ron Burt, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, Chi-
cago, Illinois 60637. E-mail: ron.burt@gsb.uchicago.edu

American Journal of Sociology
350
native ways of thinking and behaving, which gives them more options
to select from and synthesize. New ideas emerge from selection and syn-
thesis across the structural holes between groups. Some fraction of those
new ideas are good. “Good” will take on specific meaning with empirical
data, but for the moment, a good idea broadly will be understood to be
one that people praise and value.
Novelty is not a feature of this hypothesis. It is familiar in the socio-
logical theory of Simmel ([1922] 1955) on conflicting group affiliations or
Merton ([1948] 1968a, [1957] 1968c) on role sets and serendipity in science.
The hypothesis is so broadly familiar, in fact, that one can see it in the
remarks of prominent creatives. For example, discussing commerce and
manners, Adam Smith ([1766] 1982, p. 539) noted that “when the mind
is employed about a variety of objects it is some how expanded and
enlarged.” Swedberg (1990, p. 3) begins his book on academics working
the boundary between economics and sociology with John Stuart Mills’s
([1848] 1987, p. 581) opinion that “it is hardly possible to overrate the
value . . . of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to
themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those withwhich
they are familiar. . . . Such communication has always been, and is pe-
culiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.” Jean-
Rene´ Fourtou, former CEO of the French chemical giant Rhoˆne-Poulenc,
observed that his scientists were stimulated to their best ideas by people
outside their own discipline. Fourtou emphasized le vide—literally, the
emptiness; conceptually, structural holes—as essential to coming up with
new ideas (Stewart 1996, p. 165): “Le vide has a huge function in orga-
nizations. . . . Shock comes when different things meet. It’s the interface
that’s interesting. . . . If you don’t leave le vide, you have no unexpected
things, no creation. There are two types of management. You can try to
design for everything, or you can leave le vide and say, ‘I don’t know
either; what do you think?’” Biochemist Alex Zaffaroni is an exemplar.
A former subordinate is quoted in an INSEAD video case explaining
Zaffaroni’s value to his organization: “He is reading and thinking very
widely. He is totally unafraid of any new technology in any area of human
creativity. He has wonderful contacts with people in many different areas,
so he sees the bridges between otherwise disparate fields.”
2
2
Also see Hatch (1999) on the importance of empty places to the integrated impro-
visation among jazz musicians playing together, Giuffe (1999) on the greater attention
given to photographers with careers in networks of sparsely connected photographers,
and more broadly, White (1993) on art as a struggle to establish identity in a network
of brokering arrangements among agents and other artists. Productive analogy can be
drawn to Merton’s (1968a) view of serendipity in science. Expanding on research’s
familiar passive role in testing theory, Merton discusses active roles that research can
play in shaping theory, one of which is the serendipity pattern in which an “unantic-