Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Unpacking Burt’S Constraint Measure, Martin G. Everett, Stephen P. Borgatti

Management Faculty Publications

Burt (1992) proposed two principal measures of structural holes, effective size and constraint. However, the formulas describing the measures are somewhat opaque and have led to a certain amount of confusion. Borgatti (1997) showed that, for binary data, the effective size formula could be written very simply as degree (ego network size) minus average degree of alters within the ego network. The present paper presents an analogous reformulation of the constraint measure. We also derive minima and maxima for constraint, showing that, for small ego networks, constraint can be larger than one, and for larger ego networks, constraint cannot get …