The Reconnection Process: Mobilizing the Social Capital of Dormant Ties
研究了人们如何重新激活旧有关系（休眠关系）并调动其中的社会资本，发现成功的关键在于记住对方、更新近况和双方对关系有相似认知，否则可能失败。
Prior research has identified the value of reconnecting dormant ties (i.e., people you used to know), allowing individuals to refresh relationships and mobilize the value inherent in a tie (i.e., its social capital). However, less well understood is how this reconnection process occurs, including how it can be done well or poorly. To address this lack of knowledge, we conducted multi-organizational research combining an inductive, qualitative field study of professional reconnections by individuals in the North Italian textile district (Study 1) and, to validate our findings, a vignette-based experiment with U.S. workers (Study 2). We find that the process of reconnecting dormant ties can and does fail, sometimes dramatically, when people do not refresh the tie and, as a result, do not trust where they stand with each other. Specifically, we find that three elements—remembering, catching up, and perceiving the tie similarly—are key to successfully mobilizing the value of a dormant tie.