Monday, November 14, 2011

People Will Talk in the NY Post

Yesterday's New York Post has an article extracted/adapted from People Will Talk.

It's mostly about gossip, the subject of two of the book's chapters. To go to the source for a lot of what's in the article, check out the work of Ronald Burt at U Chicago. He's found that one's reputation is a product of one's social network, and that the kind of reputation you get depends a lot on the structure of your network - particularly on how closed (cliquey, in which everyone talks to everyone else) or open it is.

In particular, I refer you to these two pdfs:

Gossip and reputation

Closure and Stability: Persistent Reputation and Enduring Relations among Bankers and Analysts

And his 2005 book Brokerage and Closure.

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