Building Inter-Organizational Social Capital Instruments to Evaluate Collaborative Networks

Janaina Macke, Rolando Vargas Vallejos, Eduardo Dalpiccoli Toss

.

DOI: 10.4236/ib.2010.21007                

Abstract

This paper presents the development process of an inter-organizational social capital survey to evaluate collaborative networks. The survey instrument construction was based on three main sources. The first one, was a deep literature research that covered social capital and collaborative network issues. The second, a meta-analysis from well-known journals basically taken from the Business Source Premier Database. Finally, the third, was an exploratory research done in a Brazilian enterprise collaborative network. In this exploratory phase, we used semi-structured interviews, direct observation and document analysis. As a result of this work, we present two instruments for inter-organizational social capital evaluation: a qualitative instrument, built in the first stage of the study and a quantitative instrument (survey) built from the results of the exploratory phase.

Keywords

Interorganizational Social Capital, Collaborative Networks, Qualitative Instrument, Survey Instrument, Brazil

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	SEDAI (Secretaria do Desenvolvimento e Assuntos Internacionais do Rio Grande do Sul), “Redes de coopera??o: A for?a da uni?o,” Porto Alegre, 2005.
[2]	J. S. Coleman, “Foundations of social theory,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
[3]	G. Loury, “Why would we care about group inequality?” Social Philosophy & Policy, Vol. 5, pp. 249–271, 1987.
[4]	W. E. Baker, “Market networks and corporate behavior,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 96, pp. 589–625, 1990.
[5]	R. D. Putnam, R. Leonardi, and R. Y. Nanetti, “Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy,” Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.
[6]	F. Fukuyama, “Trust: The social creation virtues and the creation of prosperity,” Free Press, New York, 1995.
[7]	J. Nahapiet and S. Ghoshal, “Social capital, intellectual capital and the organizational advantage,” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 242–266, 1998.
[8]	R. V. Vallejos, “Um modelo para forma??o de Empresas Virtuais no setor de moldes e matrizes,” Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2005.
[9]	L. M. Camarinha-Matos and H. Afsarmanesh, “Collaborative networks: A new scientific discipline,” Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Springer, The Netherlands, No. 16, pp. 439–452, 2005.
[10]	J. S. Brown and P. Duguid, “Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation,” Organization Science, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 40–57, 1999.
[11]	R. L. Katz, “Skills of an effective administrator,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 90–102, September/October 1974.
[12]	World Bank, Social Capital Assessment Toolkit, 2004. http://www1.worldbank.org/sp/ldconference/Materials/Parallel/PS1/PS1_S1_PPT1.pdf.
[13]	J. Onyx and P. Bullen, “Measuring social capital in five communities,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 23–42, 2000.
[14]	R. V. Vallejos, J. Macke, P. M. Olea, and E. D. Toss, “Collaborative networks and social capital: A theoretical and practical convergence,” Pervasive Collaborative Networks, Springer, Boston, Vol. 283, pp. 43–52, 2008.