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10. Local Brokerage Positions and Access to Unique Information

: The theory of structural holes (Burt 1995) provides an explanation regarding network positions and their associated benefits in many social settings. One of the key points of the theory is formulated on the node level and is about efficient access to information and resources. Namely, actors bridging structural holes by connecting otherwise disconnected segments of a social network, the brokers, have access to information that circulates over the network while simultaneously maintaining relatively small number of ties. For example, scientists often maintain non-redundant collaboration ties because they are associated with academically-relevant resources unavailable in other collaborations. Apart from the above node-level property one can formulate a tie-level property corresponding to the ‘ tie redundancy ’ . Studying a process of the network information diffusion explicitely with a computational experiment and tools of information theory allows us to compare local properties of the diffusion with structural features related to the Burtian notions of brokerage and redundancy. We argue and demonstrate that (1) the above mentioned node-level and tie-level properties can be supplemented with a triad-level one. Specifically, that the notion of ‘ tie redundancy ’ should be in fact considered as an essentially triadic property. Further, (2) each of the three properties is associated with a viable empirical strategy of testing whether (aspects of) the structural holes mechanism is at work in a given network.