what is a structural hole
In Structural Holes, Ron Burt (1992; 1995) describes a set of new measures based on ego networks. One key set of measures is concerned with the notion of redundancy. The general meaning of redundancy is clear: a person's ego network has redundancy to the extent that her contacts are connected to each other as well.or example, on page 53 of Structural Holes, Table 2.1 gives the effective sizes of six networks. One of them is ... Table 2.1 gives the effective size of this ego network as 4, but this is clearly wrong: the effective size is 7, yielding an efficiency score of 0.875.