Social Capital and Information Technology

Citation

Glosiene, A. (2006), "Social Capital and Information Technology", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 62 No. 5, pp. 640-642. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410610688787

The book Social Capital and Information Technology is a selection of peer reviewed papers from a workshop organized by the editors and held in Amsterdam in 2002, with the addition of some invited papers by social researchers. It is a collection of articles “on the interplay between two rather independent fields of research: information technology and social capital”, responding “to a need to incorporate a relational perspective within the field of applied computer science research” (p. vi). The issues covered in the 14 articles written by 26 authors from various countries (the USA, The Netherlands, Japan, Germany, the UK, Finland, and Canada) – computer scientists, sociologists, researchers in communication studies, business economics, and management studies, – belong to much broader interdisciplinary field than applied computer science. Undoubtedly, organizational theorists, researchers in knowledge management, information and library science (whose views and publications on information behavior, knowledge management, trust and other aspects of social capital are not, by the way, visible in this book at all), as well as sociologists and politologists would also consider problems of social capital (both in relation to IT and in other perspectives) to overlap with their fields of interest.

Social capital today is one of the widely‐used frameworks in academic, political, business and other settings:

For a variety of reasons, life is easier in a community blessed with a substantial stock of social capital. In the first place, networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust. Such networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved. When economic and political negotiation is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are reduced. At the same time, networks of civic engagement embody past success at collaboration, which can serve as a cultural template for future collaboration. Finally, dense networks of interaction probably broaden the participants' sense of self, developing the “I” into the “we,” or (in the language of rational‐choice theorists) enhancing the participants' “taste” for collective benefits (Putnam, 1995).

A growing number of analysts are now reassessing basic perspectives on fostering economic development and what constitutes economic success, and there is now a broad discussion of the dependence of economic growth on investments in healthy social relations – the agenda of economic development now includes issues of social capital and trust that form the roots of connections in society and organizations. In the postmodern pluralistic multi‐cultural society, we are facing tensions between, on one hand, highly profiled and individualistic styles of management, work, behavior, and decision making and, on the other, need for higher civic participation, social inclusion, and social networking. Being more individualistic does not mean becoming anti‐social. On the contrary, we “bowl alone” and we do not want to “bowl alone”, tending to engage in new networks and virtual communities that are different from traditional community life. ICTs play important, if not crucial, role in shaping these changes. This idea is also expressed by the three authors of the chapter Fostering Social Creativity by Increasing Social Capital – Gerhard Fischer, Eric Sharff, and Yunwen Ye: “The Western belief in individualism romanticizes the perception of a solitary process in creative activity, but the reality is that scientific and artistic forms emerge from joint thinking, passionate conversations, and shared struggles common in meaningful relationships” (p. 356).

The book is structured into three parts: Social Capital in Civic Engagement; Social Capital in Knowledge Sharing; and Applications of IT. The book reveals the role and power of social capital in building and sustaining very different (both virtual and face to face) communities: Finnish dog breeding society (Liisa Syrjänen and Kari Kuutti), Multiple Sport Newsgroup – a newsgroup for people interested in multiple sports (Anita Blanchard), Iranian NGOs (Markus Rohde), communities of children in after‐school programs (Robbin Chapman), etc. Cases are presented mostly in socio‐technical research approach and demonstrate that IT is adding value to the social capital within these communities, supporting the social ties and providing tools for change. It provides infrastructure for social interaction thus facilitating creation, diffusion, and sharing of knowledge, building trust, forming social capital, naturalizing common values and goals.

The editors and authors have given special account to theoretical reasoning behind the concept of social capital. Although the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is mentioned often, his definition of social capital from a Marxist paradigm does not ground the authors' standpoint. The contributors to Social Capital and Information Technology favor the tradition of US communitarianism more: “In this tradition social capital is community centered. Communities, in turn, are seen as voluntaristic social units that promote the harmonic development of organizations and society as a whole” (p. 3). Communitarian perspective is also brought in for the analysis of the communities of practice: “it is the community instead of individual or organization that structures action and provides the key frame of reference. This perspective argues that we know what we know through our relationships with others in the community” (p. 3.). Here some methodological pitfalls could be pointed out. First, communities are complex and varied. Geographically defined neighborhoods are not necessarily “voluntaristic social units”. It rather is the inner voluntary decision, based on moral obligations, reciprocity and trust, of its members to communicate and cooperate. If so, individual dimension in social capital could not be easily ignored. Problematic extrapolation of the validity and usefulness of social capital from Putnam's individual perspective to an organizational perspective, especially for business organizations, is noted by Syrjänen and Kuutti (pp. 22‐3) who also state their view that “the jump from individuals to whole organization is still ungrounded”.

Second, it seems that the concept of cultural capital, created by Bourdieu, convincingly applied by recent social and cultural analysts (see, for example Jeannote, 2003), and not explored in the reviewed book – could be useful to explain the relationship between individual and collective dimensions of social capital. There is a considerable overlap among the human, cultural and social capital, they all are instrumental in promoting the well‐being of the individuals who invest in them. While there is a consensus today that there are collective benefits from investments in human and social capital, cultural capital is often underestimated or overlooked. Cultural capital is not a subset of social capital but as one of the inputs to the formation of institutions, norms, and shared meanings. The evidence presented by Jeannotte also suggests that a very important feedback loop may exist between the cultural capital and civil society/social capital that has not hitherto been acknowledged.

Cultural aspects of organizational life are touched upon in the second part of the book Social Capital and Knowledge Sharing. It deals with organizational aspects of knowledge sharing relationships between individuals, within the organizations and between them. Cultural individual and collective norms of willingness, motivation and eagerness to share are shown as significant factors to be taken into account when building IT infrastructure as a means of communication of knowledge. Marleen Huysman, in her article “Design requirements for knowledge‐sharing tools: a need for social capital analysis” argues that such knowledge management (KM) tools as “intranet applications fail the test of institutionalization” (p. 187) because these tools do not sufficiently address the social capital of a social network. The earlier conducted research project that studied the experiences of several larger companies with KM showed that most initiatives are confronted with three types of fallacies or traps: the IT trap, the management trap, and the individual learning trap. The IT trap, states Huysman, “lurks particularly in the assumption that IT can positively support and improve knowledge sharing while ignoring the social conditions that trigger or hinder the sharing knowledge between people” (p. 189). There is a tendency to de‐contextualize IT, assuming that “all knowledge can be transformed and stored in systems”, and ignoring the question What is in KM initiatives for the knowledge worker? (p. 200). The author is firm in statement that “tacit knowledge does not need to be transformed into explicit knowledge in order to share it with others” and that there is not only the need to address the social when designing technology but that technology needs to be embedded in the social structure (p. 202).

Charles Steinfield contributed to the book with the article “Explaining the underutilization of business‐to‐business e‐commerce in geographically defined business clusters: the role of social capital” where two trends – development of B2B electronic marketplaces and growing interest in and significance of business clusters – are examined. The author brings these two disparate topics together, pointing out that “if geographically defined business clusters are of increasing significance, then electronic marketplaces that fail to take location and social relationships into account will be of little use in these contexts” (p. 210). The overview of the literature and analysis of views on geographical business clusters and use of IT in them is followed by the conclusion (B2B electronic systems are underutilized by local business clusters because “most efforts to improve B2B commerce focus on the construction of transaction support systems that are relatively opaque to – or even worse, attempt to substitute for – social information and assume that location is irrelevant”, p. 224) and a list of new research questions. More generally the need to further explore various aspects of social capital and IT is also stressed by the editors of the book in the introductory chapter.

A very interesting article “The impact of social capital on project‐based learning” is presented by Mike Bresnen, Linda Edelman, Sue Newell, Harry Scarbrough, and Jacky Swan, who look at project‐based environments that are a potentially rich arena for innovations and knowledge transfer. The authors state that in such dynamic environments “social capital may be more difficult to develop, sustain and exploit” (p. 233). The three case studies of projects being undertaken within three organizations in three different industrial sectors (namely, telecommunications, construction, and health care) reveal both positive and negative effects of social capital on cross‐project learning. The research is based on conceptual framework developed by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1988) that distinguishes between the structural, cognitive, and relational dimensions of social capital. The three case studies demonstrated how social capital simultaneously helped provide access to knowledge that was otherwise difficult to obtain, and it also revealed the exclusionary effects.

Social Capital and Information Technology does not ignore the negative side of social capital: restriction imposed on actors who do not belong to the network, a lack of perception of environmental changes outside the network, negative social dynamics within the network and downward leveling of norms, a dependency on central actors and their loyalty toward the network, etc. (pp. 6‐7). Indeed, the stronger are the networks, the higher is social cohesion within them, the more atomized is society as a whole and the more excluded is a stranger outside the network. Both positive and negative impacts of the Internet and social capital are explicitly discussed by Annabel Quan‐Hasse and Barry Wellman (“How does the internet affect social capital?”, pp. 113‐32).

The third part of this impressive book contains four chapters that study 11 computer applications having potential to augment social capital. These applications, first of all, provide communication tools and spaces for communities of interest between both those who know each other and those who have only virtual contacts. These communication spaces are also providing editing, annotating and other tools to develop, create, and store topic‐centered materials. The Answer Garden is one of the most inspiring examples (Mark S. Ackerman and Christine Halverson, “Sharing expertise: the next step for knowledge management”, pp. 274‐99) connecting information from repositories and from people. Ackerman and Halverson also refer to Nahapiet's and Ghoshal's conceptual framework (and Fischer, Sharff, and Ye as well, in the article “Fostering social creativity by increasing social capital”), focusing more on structural and relational dimensions of social capital, leaving aside the cognitive one. The authors suggest change of metaphor of knowledge management (is it really just a metaphor?) for metaphor of expertise sharing. They argue that there is a social‐technical gap between what we do socially and what computer applications support technically. They also state that including social‐structural and social‐relational considerations in the design of technology is rewarding, but also inherently difficult (p. 278). One of these difficulties is hidden in what Ackerman and Halverson call impression management. People's social and information‐sharing behavior is very nuanced; these nuances make a difference that is ignored by computational systems used for knowledge sharing.

Expertise location and matchmaking is a topic of Andreas Becks', Tim Reichling's, and Volker Wulf's article, “Expertise finding: approaches to foster social capital”. The authors review five main research directions (expertise‐profiling systems; topic‐oriented communication channels; discussion and annotation systems; collaborative recommender systems; and mutual awareness), and then concentrate mainly on the applications that are supposed to foster social capital within an e‐learning platform by matching learners' personal data.

The article “Fostering social creativity by increasing social capital” – already mentioned – discusses such “social capital sensitive systems” and collaborative environments as Open Source, Experts Exchange, CodeBroker, EDC, Courses‐as‐seeds from the SER (Seeding, Evolutionary Growth and Reseeding) process model point of view.

Robbin Chapman, the author of the chapter “Pearls of Wisdom: Social Capital Building in Informal Learning Environments” – like Ackerman in the Answer Garden – ties together a shared repository with technical support for social networks. Pearls of Wisdom is a suite of software tools to support asynchronous knowledge sharing among Computer Clubhouse members. It enables users to create Pearls, computational artifacts containing community‐supplied expertise with software design tools, such as graphic programs, robotics, music studio software. The expertise is then disseminated to the community in the form of interactive Web pages. The Pearls of Wisdom interface is designed to motivate Pearl creation and use. It takes into account the three tenants of social capital building – networks, norms, and trust – reflecting the practices around knowledge sharing that are part of the young members (ages ten to 18) of the ClubHouse (pp. 301‐31).

When reading this impressive book, one may sometimes be puzzled about what, in the end, social capital is, if the concept can be used in so many different meanings (sometimes those that are useful for one particular case only …). It may also be felt that the methodological grounding for applying the concept of social capital for firms and organizations, equaling them with communities, used in most chapters of this book is still not fully convincing and requires further research. But it certainly gives what any good book does: guidance, inspiration, and reflection. Almost all articles cover theoretical considerations on the concept of social capital, sometimes repeating what was already read (pp. 1‐6, 22‐24, 195‐8, 232, 234‐40, 273‐4, 301‐03, 333‐5, etc.) but it makes each of them a separate piece of research and reflection that could be recommended for students and researchers of social capital in various contexts.