Social Capital and Social Networking
To understand social networking in the enterprise, one would need to know what are the key ingredients for social networking to exist. I will try to explain this using the social capital theory (SCT).
Social capital theory consists of variety of components and personally I believe that most of them can be applied to making a social networking platform successful. The diagram below shows a breakdown of the key ideas in the social capital theory (click to image enlarge).
I would not go into all aspects of this theory but I would want to highlight some aspects of it that might be of interest to social networking practitioners.
1) Generalised Norms refers to a degree of consensus in the social system. It could refer to many different things from a cooperation norm (meaning its normal for people to cooperate and help each other online [read: volunteerism]) or a selfish norm or a trusting norm or a supportive norm. This is really derived from the workplace culture and unknowingly it is brought over to the social networking platform. Note that norms are also derived from the society norms, therefore employees in different countries may have a different view of the norm.
2) Neighbourhood connections refers to the network configuration of the platform. Moving away from SCT, social networking within the enterprise can be split into two main categories 1) access, timing and referrals and 2) density, connectivity and hierarchy. This is strongly related to SCT as this theory is all about providing access to information through the network.
Access – how useful is the information acquired from the network.
Timing – how fast does it take to acquire that piece of information.
Referrals – Connections in the network available to help improve the quality of the information.
Density – how many people are participating
Connectivity – how easy is it to create connections
Hierarchy – Are there roadblocks that prevent connections and sharing?
3) Volunteerism is pretty straightforward. There are three main questions in my head at the moment which is 1) Are people willing to volunteer? 2) What is the quality of the output expected by the volunteers and 3) Do people have time to volunteer? One can argue that if this is about social networking in an organisation, why is there a need to volunteer and help someone which is unlikely to impact on the end of year performance review outcomes? I totally agree, however, the more you volunteer (assuming the outout is good), news travels and it will finally come back to you and make the volunteer look like someone who not only does well in the day to day work but also stepping up and out to help others.
4) Trust is possibly the most important factor in a social network. People are generally more willing to engage in social activity when there is trust. Its a simple logic, why do you share more information about yourself with a close friend than with someone you just met? Sharing opens someone up to vulnerability and it requires some levels of trust and incentive for people to do so.
The above are some of the interesting aspects of SCT that will affect social networking in organisations and it shows some of the key ingredients for a social network to be successful.
Part of this article is adapted from Nahapiet, J. and S. Ghoshal (1998). “Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage.” The Academy of Management Review 23(2): 242-266.
Add A Comment