The initial evidence for the importance of weak ties came from studies of how people found jobs however the theory applies to other situations.

The first example is that a good friend of mine needed to do some traveling to a big college town and did not want to deal with hotels and he will be staying with a classmate of mine from high school. My relationship with my friend at Cornell is a very strong tie, we have taken almost exactly the same courses and live together.Alternately I have spoken with my classmate at most two or three times after we graduated high school, thus is an extremely weak tie.

A second example is the process of recommendations for graduate school. The basic structure is that the writer and the student presumable have a strong tie between them or else the student would not be asking for a letter recommendation and the writer would not have agreed. It is also assumed that the writer knows other faculty in their field at peer institutions through a variety of other means (they went to school together, same field, etc). The weight that those letters carry depend on not only what they say, but who they are written by.Letters written by people who are well known to the people reading them will clearly carry more weight than those written by those who are unknown to the reader. These is because if the writer and reader know each other the reader can assume less exaggeration in the letter because there is some social capital in their relationship. If a writer exaggerates for a student and the reader acts on this and then find the student to be throughly lacking the reader is less likely to take that writer seriously again. Thus if in the future there is another student whom the writer wants to promote the writer will be less effective. Secondly the reader will have some understanding of the personality and thus will be able to assign more specific understanding ambiguous statements . Last these relationships are reciprocal. If a writer feels that her letters are being disregarded by the reader then it is possible that in the future the roles may be reversed and the reader’s letters will not be taken seriously by the writer which would not be in the interest of the reader. This is all assuming that reader and writer are on good terms.

It is also possible that they may in fact dislike each other and having a letter from one would be a black mark in the eyes of the other.

An alternate way to look at this process is to think of letters of recommendation more as letters of introduction that serve as a formalized way to complete triadic closure.