Social Capital
Social capital is the set of relationships, shared values, culture, and context that support group cohesion, trust, and teamwork in a society or organization. At the personal level, it describes a person’s ability to benefit from personal connections. It
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Social Capital
Social capital is the set of relationships, shared values, culture, and context that support group cohesion, trust, and teamwork in a society or organization. At the personal level, it describes a person’s ability to benefit from personal connections. It might mean helping a friend in Uruguay connect with a contact in Atlanta to help explore a business opportunity in an emerging field. At the organizational level, social capital is critical as the network of customers or relationship with suppliers and investors are key determinants of success. Nationally, there is a need for mechanisms for building social cohesion, particularly for societies with large numbers of immigrants. The traditional immigrant societies usually have established structures for ensuring most newcomers are assimilated into the social and economic communities. Social capital is the foundation of continuing cooperation because it builds trust within communities. It can also facilitate innovation because in a large social network, such as Silicon Valley, inventors, entrepreneurs, and smart ideas continually collide in daily life and sometimes they mesh to create a new organization. The first mention of social capital has been attributed to Lyda Hanifan in 1916, who defined it as Those tangible assets [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit.1
This is an individual perspective, but the notion is also relevant for organizations and societies. Many people spend much of their daily life as members of organizations, and they are typically attracted by those that provide a setting for goodwill, fellowship, and so forth. Organizations that can fulfill this need build social capital. Similarly, most of us want to live in a society that has the same attributes.
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Hanifan, L. J. (1916). The rural school community center. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 67(1), 130–138.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. T. Watson, Capital, Systems, and Objects, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9418-2_12
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Social Capital
In the knowledge economy, social and human capital have a symbiotic relationship that promotes the growth of both. Your social capital is a means of finding people who might help you solve a problem or identify a new job. Alternatively, you might help someone solve a problem or tag them for a new position in your organization. The greater your human capital, what you know, attracts more social connections, and the greater your social capital, who you know, builds human capital through opportunities for exercising your human capital.
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Economic ! Social
The creation of social capital is facilitated by the availability of venues in which people can meet and gain shared experiences, such as playing sports, tending a community garden, and relivi
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