He is the Charles M. Harper Leadership Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Distinguished Professor at Bocconi University.
in Sociology from The State University of New York at Albany in 1973 working with Nan Lin.
[2] His dissertation committee also included the social network analyst Edward Laumann.
He is also the former Shell Professor of Human Resources at INSEAD and has held various organizational development positions at Raytheon.
He is the author of several books on sociology, organization behavior and network analysis, including Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Harvard University Press, 1992) and Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital (Oxford University Press, 2005) His research has been published in numerous academic journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Social Networks, Sociological Inquiry, and others.