What do you mean by social capital?

I use Adler and Kwon's definition of social capital:

"the goodwill that is engendered by the fabric of social relations"

but Putnam who also identified bridging and bonding social capital, conceptualised it as

"arising from a stock of networks, norms and trust"

My research draws heavily on Nahapiet and Ghoshal's paper, which refers to Bourdieu's concept of social capital as the actual or potential resources that can be accessed through networks of relationships, and that potentiality is important in a situation like a project where participants haven't yet interactedl, and social capital has yet to be mobilised.

Although there isn't one agreed definition of it, social capital theory is relevant to explaining relationships so it's relevant to what I've been researching, but social capital theory doesn't go far enough in explaining ab initio relationships where people have not yet interacted and exchanged social capital. To explain such new relationships we need a theory that extends on the theory of social capital.

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Adler, P. S. & Kwon, S.-W. 2002. Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept. Academy of Management Review, 27(1): 17-40.
Nahapiet, J. & Ghoshal, S. 1998. Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242-266.
Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York ; London: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam. 1993. The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life. American Prospect, 13: 35-42.

Fitting engagement

I've got a model that fits engagement in with social capital.

I've struggled for three weeks with the theory for this framework, but all came together when I got the diagram working about a week ago. Then the rest slotted into place, requiring only that I connect the ideas by using words to explain and support my argument.

It's thanks to a few comments from supervisor #2, and constant reading of any possibly relevant literature that my ideas begin to pull together. I need to present them to my fellow students to see what they think before I expose myself to big cheese academics because what I've got is either really good, or it's pants.

I'm well chuffed.

What’s the difference between social capital and trust?

Trust is “a key facet of social capital” {Nahapiet, 1998} that you can use to build up social capital. So is there any difference?

Assuming trust promotes useful knowledge {Levin, 2004 } - hence the value added bit - then you'd share knowledge with people you trust, but it's something that feeds into social capital, an aspect of social capital.

Pinto et al {2008} say trust facilitates positive relationships on projects. That's adding value too, but it's facilitating an aspect of social capital - it isn't social capital. But you couldn't have social capital without trust. Trust provides a competitive advantage to the consultant (Block, 2000) so would help a consultant to build social capital in a new project.

Trust cements critical stakeholder relationships {Pinto, 2008}, which is what a consultant must be looking at - the various stakeholders. Pinto et al's study views it as valuable to manage interorganisational relationships to improve trust, so it's a kind of lubricant {Costa, 2009} - an oil (which is what some of my interviewees suggested).

Fukuyama relates trust to culture, 1996}; networks are a means of trust generation and networks can save on transaction costs. That's really interesting because it suggests that the networks of social capital generate trust, but trust also generates social capital - there's a positive feedback loop.

Wenger's new book 2009 Digital Habitats "learning together depends on the qualities of trust and mutual engagement that member develop with each other" (p8) so he doesn't say trust is a facet of engagement but trust and engagement together lead to learning. And how does that differ from social capital?

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Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust : the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. London, Penguin.
Levin, D. Z. & Cross, R. 2004. The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer. Management Science, 50(11): 1477-1490.
McCormick, T. i. r. i. c. o. M. 1999. The impact of large-scale participative interventions on participants.
Nahapiet, J. & Ghoshal, S. 1998. Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242-266.
Pinto, J. K., Slevin, D. P., & English, B. 2008. Trust in projects: An empirical assessment of owner/contractor relationships. International Journal of Project Management, In Press, Corrected Proof.

Shoe horn engagement

You know what a shoe horn is? It's a tool for helping you fit into a shoe that's just a bit too tight.

For the last two weeks, I've been trying to shoe horn the phenomenon of engagement into Nahapiet and Ghoshal's framework of three dimensions of social capital. And it doesn't quite fit, or it's too tight. Their framework includes trust, and that seems to be an aspect of engagement. It's aspects of the relational dimension that seem most relevant.

But I can't quite work out how to adapt their diagram to include engagement. Somehow social capital drives and includes engagement, and that helps the combination and exchange of intellectual capital, so increases value. That's my hypothesis anyhow.

But perhaps I shouldn't be trying to use a shoe horn, because if a shoe doesn't fit, then it hurts.

Theoretical framework

This research is of clients’ relationships with consultants in public sector information technology (IT) projects. It will seek to identify and explain how the client engages with consultants and other suppliers in order to add value to a project.

The research question is:

How do public sector organisations engage with consultants in order to contribute to an effective IT project?

Sub questions include:

1. How does engagement contribute to an effective project?
2. How does engagement influence relationships?
3. How does the quality of relationships contribute to an effective project?
4. How does engagement vary over the life cycle of a project?
5. How does engagement help in adding value to a project?

Empirical answers to these questions could fill the gap on understanding engagement between clients and consultants. Insights could also contribute to public sector practical management of external consultants to reap value from their contribution to a project.

A review of the literature on consultancy has shown that client entities and relationships are complex. This and the literature on project management show that clients must engage with consultants for good project outcomes. A review of the literature on engagement focused on conceptualisations of engagement but also explored its various articulations. However, the literature has little to say on what client-consultant engagement might be. It is not clear how engagement manifests itself, what its factors might be or what sort of engagement leads to effective consultancy projects.

The literature on social capital allows a conceptualisation of the issue of engagement between consultants and clients on IT projects. The following sections will explain how social capital might be used as a framework for this exploration.

1 What is the problem?
Public sector IT projects often use external consultants, but are also notoriously expensive and often fail. A common cause of project failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders (OGC, 2002). In the public sector, engagement is “a critical element of a consulting project” (NAO, 2006a). The National Audit Office (NAO) exhorts clients and consultants to engage to ensure commitment, thus implying that engagement will improve performance and add value to a project. Public servants are advised to engage with consultants and consultants with their clients, but it is not clear how engagement happens or what a good quality of engagement is.
Czerniawska (Czerniawska, 2006) implies two meanings to the term ‘engagement’: the contractual engagement and the relationship. A contract of engagement may mean only initial seeking and selection but this research concerns the longer term relationship regardless of contractual arrangements. Unfortunately Czerniawska has little to say on the value of engagement as a longer term developed relationship, although she recognises that engagement as a relationship determines the success of consulting projects.

The NAO exhortation for engagement seems to be aiming at continued shared understanding; engagement must be mutual. The NAO considers from the findings of case studies that senior level engagement is crucial for successful delivery of IT enabled change (NAO, 2006c) because such engagement demonstrates senior management is committed to the change. This NAO report(NAO, 2006c) requires demonstration of commitment through engagement whilst the other NAO report (NAO, 2006a) requires ensuring commitment through engagement. There might be some confusion or inconsistency of understanding of what engagement means and does for an organisation.

So confusion and inconsistency suggest that it is a problem to understand engagement. Whether engagement is a knowable phenomenon is a moot point. Definitions of engagement are woolly and soft. Hence engagement is “a paradigm for change” (Axelrod, 2001), “the art of bringing people together” (Block, 2000), “a journey of sensing and learning” (Buckingham, 2005). It is also a two way relationship between employee and employer (Robinson D, 2004), a management philosophy (Smythe, 2007) and “a process of communication” (McMaster, 1996). Mutual engagement is a dimension of a community of practice that involves processes of community building (Wenger, 1998). In summary, engagement is a paradigm, a journey, a relationship, a philosophy, a process, an art and to the NAO “an element of a consulting project”. This variety of metaphors suggests engagement is a constructed phenomenon.

Since different constructions seem to conflate engagement with other phenomena like involvement, participation, commitment, collaboration or even motivation, I explored them in the hope of clarifying some concepts of engagement. Previous research on engagement seems to have focused on outcomes and products, being mainly surveys or quasi-experimental (Gable, 1996, Saks, 2006, Schaufeli et al., 2006) but the research question requires looking at the process of engagement and how connecting people builds trust and the commitment that the NAO wants to ensure. That process includes an ongoing negotiation of meaning (Wenger, 1998). Exploration of how meaning is negotiated might be possible using the concept of social capital. Adler and Kwon { 2002 } identify social capital as “as the good will that is engendered by the fabric of social relations and that can be mobilized to facilitate action". It may be possible to relate “the fabric of social relations” to the client-consultant relationship and the “mobilisation of goodwill to engagement”. Hence, the concept of social capital could help in exploring client-consultant engagement.
2 Why is this framework feasible?
Social capital theory can provide a way to explore engagement in relationships between clients and consultants. Its literature provides a framework for performing the specific investigation that is being proposed.

Social capital can be conceptualised as a stock of networks, norms and trust. People develop social capital in organisations. Organisations nurture social capital, which supports the development of intellectual capital because it comes though interaction of people sharing knowledge (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). Sharing knowledge, norms, and establishing social capital through people coming together on a project, provides the organisation with an advantage.

Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998) suggest three dimensions for creating intellectual capital through social capital:

• the structural dimension of network ties, configuration and appropriable organisation,
  
• the cognitive dimension of shared codes, language and narratives, and
  
• the relationship dimension of trust, established norms and obligations of how people behave.
  

Each dimension contributes in different combinations to create new intellectual capital. Combinations of the dimensions of social capital allow exchange of intellectual capital, and anticipation of value through that exchange. Value anticipated in an IT project may be other than an exchange of intellectual capital. Value may be gained from a project that delivers on time, to budget, and meets all or most of the objectives set for it. These project attributes are valuable to the parties involved. Delivery of such IT projects may be facilitated through a combination of the dimensions of social capital.

The social capital framework guides the interview questions, the three dimensions providing headings for asking questions of interviewees about relationships, concepts used and understanding.
The interview schedule relates the research question and sub questions through the social capital framework.
Questions are based round four headings:

1. background (of project and participant),
2. relationships,
3. knowledge (or learning), and
4. value.

Background is important because it provides the context. The questions may elicit structural dimensions of social capital.
Relationships matter. How do the relationships create value? The interview questions here concern social capital in the relationship and structural dimensions. Questions are to identify networks of relationships and the strength of ties between people. One question asks for a specific anecdote or story in an attempt to get more precise descriptions rather than general opinion. See {Kvale, 1996 }. These questions also aim to elicit lack of engagement in relationships, in order to reveal if the consultant and client have little in common, or need no more than a passing connection.
Knowledge: rather than directly asking about knowledge the questions are about learning and what people have learned from each other. How do they use that knowledge? This gives some idea of what value has developed from relationships.
Value: Building shared meanings is part of the cognitive dimension of social capital. There may be value gained through learning and sharing meaning. Sharing meaning may provide valuable non-financial, un-measurable qualitative gain.

Some interview questions elicit information in more than one dimension.

In summary, social capital theory offers enough complexity to provide a conceptual framework for the examination of issues of engagement between clients and consultants.

Is that completely clear? Will it be clear to my supervisors?

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ADLER, P. S. & KWON, S.-W. (2002) SOCIAL CAPITAL: PROSPECTS FOR A NEW CONCEPT. Academy of Management Review, 27, 17-40.
AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BLOCK, P. (2000) Flawless Consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer.
BUCKINGHAM, M. (2005) Chapter FOUR: 'Buy-in', not by-pass: the rules of engagement. Leadership for Leaders. Thorogood Publishing Ltd.
CZERNIAWSKA, F. (2006) Ensuring sustainable value from consultants. MCA. Management Consultancy Association.
GABLE, G. G. (1996) A multidimensional model of client success when engaging external consultants. Management Science, 42, 1175-1198.
KVALE, S. (1996) InterViews : an introduction to qualitative research interviewing, Thousand Oaks, CA ; London, Sage.
MCMASTER, M. D. (1996) The Intelligence Advantage: organizing for complexity, Butterworth-Heinemann.
NAHAPIET, J. & GHOSHAL, S. (1998) Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23, 242-266.
NAO (2006a) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment. IN NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (Ed.). HMSO.
NAO (2006b) Delivering successful IT-enabled business change: Case studies of success. IN NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (Ed.). HMSO.
OGC (2002) Common Causes of Project Failure. National Audit Office and the Office of Government Commerce.
ROBINSON D, P. S., HAYDAY S (2004) The Drivers of Employee Engagement. Institute for Employment Studies.
SAKS, A. M. (2006) Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.
SCHAUFELI, W. B., BAKKER, A. B. & SALANOVA, M. (2006) The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study. Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66, 701-716.
SMYTHE, J. (2007) The CEO chief engagement officer: turning hierarchy upside down to drive performance, Gower.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Social capital literature

Lee has just published in the International Journal of Management reviews, a comprehensive review of the literature on social capital. The article is called Social capital and business and management: Setting a research agenda.

This is a comprehensive and systematic review (it indicates an audit trail) of relevant literature on social capital. There's an emphasis on the three dimensions that Napahiet & Ghosal write about, but with a comment on the dearth of understanding of cognitive social capital.

Lee argues (page 258):

"social actors that share meaningful communication attain synergy. Efficient use of co-operative language, codes and narratives among social actors creates such a synergy."

Mixed method research is recommended to establish links between social networks and something... - "agents acting out relational and cognitive actions"

Implications for research include looking at the linkages between structural, relational and cognitive social capital. In particular "cognitive social capital and the overall impact of shared language, codes and narratives remain neglected."

Useful stuff if you're researching social capital, which I'm not. I'm using the dimensions of social capital as a framework to understand how engagement might happen.

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LEE, R. (2009) Social capital and business and management: Setting a research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11, 247-273.
NAHAPIET, J. & GHOSHAL, S. (1998) Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23, 242-266.

Thief

I missed the excitement in the office just before lunch when a thief walked in and stole a lecturer's laptop - was so cool he even said 'hello' to the victim, then walked out of the office. Victim realised laptop was missing and shouted after the man, who hastened his exit, scarpered down the stairs, out the door and made his getaway on his bicycle parked right by the door.

Why had no one questioned a stranger in the office?

We used to have a secretary who knew everybody and would accost a stranger to ask if he needed help. Super secretary had built up relationships with lots of people on the campus, but that super secretary isn't with us any more. We have a part time temp who knows few people in our building. Is this another example of the potential value of social capital that a long lasting secretary could bring?

Calculating social capital

In the British Computer Society May monthly magazine, IT Now, Karen Lawrence Öqvist discusses how to harness the social capital of a business. The article is also on line here. What surprises me is that she calculates and measures it. She creates a measurement matrix with factors:

• activity
• linking
• new groups
• knowledge capital uploaded
• knowledge capital downloaded

Apply these factors to each employee to enable measurement and convert to

"a form that will allow a picture of the informal organisation".

(It seems a bit odd to quantify something in order to get a picture).
Maybe she's got something because after all, Google's search engines use similar ranking algorithms for search results, so why not create an algorithm for social capital.

Practicalities of quantifying some of these factors stall me. For example
Knowledge Capital x Linkage x Relationship Building x Information Seeking x Information Sharing are needed to calculate employee social capital but I don't know how to quantify these. I wonder who has done the calculation, on what sort of business. How happy are they with the model? Perhaps I'd better read Öqvist's book.

Collaboration and social capital

There's quite a lot of literature on collaboration in organisations {Delbridge, 2007 ;Franco, 2008 ;Huxham, 1991 ;Huxham, 2003 ;Huxham, 2000 }

Siv Vangen and Chris Huxham have particularly researched a lot on collaboration in the public sector. What surprises me is that they cite nothing, zilch, on social capital. They just don't use any of it, not Bourdieu, not Coleman, not Putnam. I pointed this out to a supervisor, who suggested that it is because the collaboration literature doesn't take the past into account. That's interesting because Huxham and Vangen {Huxham, 2003} do mention the past in that expectations about the future of collaboration:

"will be based either on reputation or past behaviour or on more formal contracts and agreements"

but they don't recognise expectation, reputation or past behaviour as social capital.

So there's this massive gap, where the current theory and practice of collaboration doesn't apply social capital theory.

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DELBRIDGE, R. (2007) Explaining Conflicted Collaboration: A Critical Realist Approach to Hegemony. Organization Studies (01708406), 28, 1347-1357.
FRANCO, L. (2008) Facilitating Collaboration with Problem Structuring Methods: A Case Study of an Inter-Organisational Construction Partnership. Group Decision & Negotiation, 17, 267-286.
HUXHAM, C. (1991) Facilitating Collaboration: Issues in Multi-Organizational Group Decision Support in Voluntary, Informal Collaborative Settings. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 42, 1037-1045.
HUXHAM, C. (2003) Theorizing collaboration practice. Public Management Review, 5, 401-423.
HUXHAM, C. & VANGEN, S. (2000) Ambiguity, complexity and dynamics in the membership of collaboration. Human Relations, 53, 771-806.

My thesis is original in that ..

IN what way is my thesis original? I will count the ways:

1. quality of engagement is little researched
2. engagement is a waffly term, an undefined concept used muchly with little agreed understanding of the term
3. people have not looked closely at how consultants and clients work so closely together that the relationship could be called engaged
4. people have written about organisational collaboration in the public sector but not about engagement
5. UK government sees value in social capital and my work seeks to find engagement through the use of social capital. This approach is original.

Sensitizing Concepts

My first case study demonstrates that it is worth using social capital as a sensitizing concept by which to explore engagement- same form of words as in the Journal of Intellectual Disabilities p22 2009 13 19

What's a sensitizing concept? See here and here.

Can't write

I'm stuck writing with many thoughts but not on paper, starting with getting a structure to write up one case study fully. Supervisors want at least one case written in the next month, if not two and it's hard because I can't get the structure right, though I do have the beginnings of an idea. I'll start with:

• setting
• characters
• structural dimension of social capital
• relational dimensions of social capital
• cognitive dimensions of social capital
• relationships between the dimensions

Still stuck.

IS theory web site

I contacted Professors Petter and Randolph because their work is so interesting. See my earlier blog on their work here. They kindly answered. One resource they reminded me of, I haven't been there for a while, is the IS theory website, which is really useful and comprehensive. There is a page on social capital theory that includes a listing of papers in IS that use this theory:
http://www.istheory.yorku.ca/Socialcapitaltheory.htm.

Structural holes

Trying to get my head round bridging and structural holes so found a couple of papers by Burt. He writes:

"The outsider proposing an idea that bridges groups has to borrow social capital in the sense that she has to work through a strategic partner, a person who has the social capital of a network that spans structural holes."

This is what consultants have to do - use social capital and bridge holes.

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Burt, R., The social capital of structural holes accessed from http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ronald.burt/research/SCSH.pdf (page 237)
Burt, R., Structured holes versus network closure accessed from http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ronald.burt/research/SHNC.pdf

Social capital, knowledge integration and IT

Social capital fascinates me because of its potential to transfer, integrate and create knowledge. Newell et al explore social capital and knowledge integration in an IT context, which makes it a fascinating paper. It's also about real research, not just concept development, even if it is just the one case study.

First the authors review the literature on

1. knowledge integration in large IT design and implementation projects ,
2. role of social capital in facilitating knowledge integration (Coleman, Granovetter). This includes mention of
   

• communities of practice (Lave & Wenger),
• interpretivist research (Berger & Luckmann)

I'm glad to realise that I am familiar with most of this literature.

Newell et al quote Napahiet & Ghoshal's argument that individual project members need to draw on their social capital to access dispersed knowledge (Nonaka) and problems arise if members don't use social capital or cannot integrate knowledge in the project team.

The researchers included a participant observer visiting over 18 months - more time than I've got. I've got something more like six months left to collect data. They recorded hour long interviews with all nine team members as well as ten owners, which something like what I'm doing. But they also had forty informal unrecorded interviews. The write-up seems to me to be a narrative and perhaps I can write something similar for my half dozen case studies.

Newell et al's case study shows more negative use of social capital than my case studies so far. For example, there was "little attempt to share", whereas I know a project where members emphasised team work and sharing right from the start. Newell et al's case study also used two IT consultants but they "did not see any need for involvement with potential users", so there's a different attitude to engaging with clients, and certainly not an attitude that uses social capital. Another contrast is the observation "that there was very little interaction and dialogue during meetings" (p50). I found a developer who'd been described as shy and who saw herself as quiet, but admitted that she now spoke up much more at meetings. Something about sharing in the team helped her to learn and to share.

Newell et al commented on meetings that team members often missed. I've had the impression in one case that when a more junior member stood in at a meeting, that some senior managers paid less attention.

Newell et al assess the bonding and bridging in their case study .
Bonding is about social cohesion within the team (similar to De Marco's module cohesion) - the more the better).
Bridging is reaching out to other communities (similar to De Marco's coupling) - it should be weak as in Granovetter's weak links

The above indicated that the bonding was poor, but unfortunately the bridging in Newell et al's case was also poor. They refer to "structural holes".

In conclusion the authors argue that "bridging and bonding aspects of social capital must be distinguished". I can use that in analysis of the case studies I find. The antecedent condition is to develop team bonds first, and I know evidence that supports this, where sociability was encouraged and trust existed.

It also shows the value of engagement. People need to share, be involved, interact and have dialogue.

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Newell, S., Tansley, C. and Huang, J. (2004) 'Social Capital and Knowledge Integration in an ERP Project Team: The Importance of Bridging AND Bonding', British Journal of Management, 15, pp. 43-S57. 1109

Open plan, open sharing

Passing my OUBS student colleague he stopped me to ask about the QAA meeting today. One of the other students at that meeting doesn't come in too much but works at home on his laptop. He doesn't like it that he has to work in an open plan office in the new Jenny Lee building. But someone else says that now they know who is in, they don't mind saying hello in passing, whereas before, to knock on a closed door had to be done deliberately.

My OUBS colleague wouldn't have known about the QAA meeting if we hadn't been in an open plan office and regularly share bits of information in an unplanned and informal fashion. This sharing has built up the OUBS student community. At the QAA meeting three out of the ten students there came from the full time OUBS community.

I read of research that showed that if strangers were put together knowing that they would have to work together in the future, then they were likely to exchange personal information, whereas if they didn't think they would ever meet again, they shared less. Sharing personal information helped reduce uncertainty. So the OUBS students share information on an informal and unplanned basis and then when we have a need, we have each other to ask.

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Berger & Bradac, 1982, Language and social knowledge, page 16

Social capital theory & IT

I found this paper (pdf) on IT and social capital but I was too late to get to the workshop where it was presented. Randolph and Petter write on the role of social capital inIT project management, arguing that who the project manager knows is important, so they introduce the theory of social capital, suggesting implications and possible future research. I wonder if they know anyone already researching this.

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Randolph, A. B. and Petter, S. (2008) 'Is It What You Know or Who You Know? The Role of Social Capital in Information Technology Project Management', 3rd International Research Workshop on Information Technology Project Management (IRWITPM), Paris, France2008.

Social network analysis

I thought earlier that if social capital lead to increased intellectual capital through relationships then analysing the relationships might be useful. But ...

I could see network analysis was going to be difficult. If I talk with half a dozen people per project in order to elicit their social capital in terms of structure, shared concepts and relationships, that gives me qualitative data to address a qualitative research question, but not quantitative data, which is what social network analysis uses.

I could ask questions like:

• Who do you go to for information?
• How frequent is the contact?
• Is this formal or informal contact?
• What type of contact is this? F2F, email, Facebook, phone, what?

So long as I ask everyone the same questions, I can use the replies to build a graph of the relationships. It allows me to build a picture so I can see who connects with most people. But it's a quantitative approach; it requires graph theory for the maths, (programs like UCInet analyse the data) and large numbers in order to produce useful information. So it can't be an approach that fits in with my constructionist philosophy.

And to do the analysis I need to have the whole network with a definable way of putting a boundary round it. That gives me a problem of the betweext and between, liminal spaces, that Sturdy writes about in "Guess who's coming to dinner". I might have a formal network of people within a project, but other sources of social capital might be who the consultant and client introduce each other to over a dinner party. So I dont' have a definable boundary.

Now, I've been warned to steer clear of the link between social capital and social network analysis. It is unclear what social capital is - is there an agreed definition? so using SNA, which assumes something is real enough to be measured, doesn't logically follow from an investigation into social capital. However, what might be useful is Granovetter's work on weak ties. So I'm off to read Granovetter.

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Granovetter, M. S. (1973) 'The Strength of Weak Ties', The American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6), pp. 1360-1380. 1036
Sturdy, A., Schwarz, M. and Spicer, A. (2006) 'Guess who's coming to dinner? Structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy', Human Relations, 59 (7), pp. 929-960. 900

Conceptual framework

Somehow I want to use Nahapiet & Ghoshal's dimensions of social capital to write my interview questions, but those questions also need to relate to my research questions and I am not getting them to be close enough to show the audit trail. The table below shows beginning thoughts.

	Client	Consultant
Client	much social capital through institutionalisation too much capital leading to negative consequences might be another reason for bringing in consultants in some circumstances
Consultant		perhaps there’s less social capital, especially for the insecure consultants who work in liminal spaces

The matrix comes from the NAO advice on engaging between client-client, client-consultant, consultant-client and consultant-consultant. What do I put in the empty boxes?

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Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842
NAO (2006) Central Government's use of consultants Vol. HC 128 Session 2006-2007 (Ed, National Audit Office) HMSO. 577

Social capital and social networks

Social capital and social networks are not the same thing. Social networks are relationships that create the social capital.

Social networks are not always good. Being too close and therefore unbalanced relationships may for example lead to group think. I think I read that in Scott (1996). Arguably, the advent of consultants could correct the imbalance and lead to new more balanced and therefore more productive relationships.

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Scott, J. (1996) 'A Toolkit for Social Network Analysis', Acta Sociologica (Taylor & Francis Ltd), 39 (2), pp. 211-216. 843