Social Capital and Information Technology

Description:

The concept of social capital, or the value that can be derived from social ties created by goodwill, mutual support, shared language, common beliefs, and a sense of mutual obligation, has been applied to a number of fields, from sociology to management. It is only lately, however, that researchers in information technology and knowledge management have begun to explore the idea of social capital in relation to their fields. This collection of thirteen essays by computer scientists, sociologists, communication specialists, economists, and others presents a multidisciplinary look at this particular intersection of information technology and social science and the need to adopt a sociotechnical perspective.

For the most part the contributors take a positive view of the interplay of social capital, knowledge sharing, and community building. Some essays look at specific instances, including the on-line and face-to-face relationships of a community of athletes, the building of social capital among Iranian NGOs, and the Internet-based communities created by the open-source movement, while others discuss more general ideas of civic and personal communities. The last four essays examine computer applications that augment social capital, including topic- and member-centered communications spaces such as the Expert Finder and the Loops system and virtual repositories of knowledge such as the Answer Garden and Pearls of Wisdom.

Marleen Huysman is Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems, Marketing and Logistics, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Vrije Unversiteit Amsterdam.

Volker Wulf is Associate Professor at the University of Siegen, Senior Researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, and Head of the International Institute for Socio-Informatics, Bonn.

 

Table of Contents:

Preface	vii
1	Social Capital and Information Technology: Current Debates and Research Marleen Huysman and Volker Wulf	1
I	Social Capital in Civic Engagement	17
2	Trust, Acceptance, and Alignment: The Role of IT in Redirecting a Community Anna-Liisa Syrjänen and Kari Kuutti	21
3	The Effects of Dispersed Virtual Communities on Face-to-Face Social Capital Anita Blanchard	53
4	Find What Binds: Building Social Capital in an Iranian NGO Community System Markus Rohde	75
5	How Does the Internet Affect Social Capital? Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman	113
II	Social Capital in Knowledge Sharing	133
6	The Ties That Share: Relational Characteristics That Facilitate Information Seeking Rob Cross and Stephen P. Borgatti	137
7	Exploring the Eagerness to Share Knowledge: The Role of Social Capital and ICT in Knowledge Sharing Bart van den Hooff, Jan de Ridder and Eline Aukema	163
8	Design Requirements for Knowledge-Sharing Tools: A Need for Social Capital Analysis Marleen Huysman	187
9	Explaining the Underutilization of Business-to-Business E-Commerce in Geographically Defined Business Clusters: The Role of Social Capital Charles Steinfeld	209
10	The Impact of Social Capital on Project-Based Learning Mike Bresnan, Linda Edelman, Sue Newell, Harry Scarbrough and Jacky Swan	231
III	Applications of IT	269
11	Sharing Expertise: The Next Step for Knowledge Management Mark Ackerman and Christine Halverson	273
12	Pearls of Wisdom: Social Capital Building in Informal Learning Environments Robbin Chapman	301
13	Expertise Finding: Approaches to Foster Social Capital Andreas Becks, Tim Reichling and Volker Wulf	333
14	Fostering Social Creativity by Increasing Social Capital Gerhard Fischer, Eric Scharff and Yunwen Ye	355
	Contributors	401
	Index	403