Structural Holes Analysis

Structural holes analysis, developed by Ronald Burt, measures the brokerage opportunities available to an actor by examining the gaps — structural holes — between their otherwise disconnected contacts. An actor whose contacts do not know each other bridges non-redundant sources of information and control and is said to be rich in structural holes; an actor whose contacts are all interconnected is constrained. The core measures — network constraint, effective size, and efficiency — quantify how much advantage an ego's network structure confers.