Assertions:
- I assert that social capital is a productive force, meaning that trust, norms of behaviour, obligations, and reciprocity will influence effectiveness, abilitity to innovate, develop, and thrive, as well as loyalty amongst co-workers
- I assert a social perspective on the notion of social capital. Thus I believe that the production of social capital depends on context. This means that a. some people in a network are better at generating trust and reciprocity, and thereby better at playing the game*. b. Content, meaning, and lived praxis of factors such as trust, norms of behaviour, obligations, and reciprocity will vary according to context
- I assert that social capital is accumulative
- I assert that social capital is embedded in the structure of relations in a network, and not the possession of individuals
- I assert that the accumulation of social capital is for the benefit of the collective
- I assert that social capital has to be studied empirically
- I assert the proliferation of a methodology that seeks to understand the quality of relations and put focus on the dynamics of everyday practice in an organization
* Bourdieu (1979) would say that how well you play the game depend on the volume of both economic, cultural, symbolic, and social capital available to you.
… and then all of a sudden it comes back to you. Finally you can say goodbye to that numbing feeling of being lost which has been haunting you for the last couple of months or actually it just vanishes as the words of Mary Douglas sieves through your brain:
“Though giving [solidarity and trust, my addition] is the basis for huge industries, we cannot know whether it is the foundation of a circulating fund of stable esteem and trust, or of individualist competion […] We cannot know because the knowledge is not collected in such a way as to relate to the issue” (Douglas, foreword in The Gift [1990] 1950: xv-xvi)
I’m reading Marcel Mauss’ The Gift for the first time since my first year of grad school. The book, even though it’s more than fifty years old and based on a fieldwork far away from the industrial society Mary Douglas talks about or the knowledge society of today it still present itself as the mother of all theories of relations. And I promise, you’re in for a treat if you’re open minded. I suggest replacing “… circulating fund of stable esteem and trust” with the notion of social capital. Then read the book with our present society or (as in my case) with organizations in mind. And extend the meaning of a gift to include all acts of reciprocity.
The literature on social capital I have been reading so far have had a tendency to be oriented mainly towards individuals. It is usually about individuals who either bring forward or stop the production of social capital, and about who and how many the individuals are related to.
The Gift focuses on the actual act of reciprocity in place of the people. From the perspective of organizational studies this means that instead of pinpointing who’s connected to whom Marcel Mauss prompts you to focus on how people are connected, and on the nature of the actions which connect people. Thus if you are interested in changing behaviour or encouraging certain behaviours you have to put your focus on the actual action and deeds. That was exactly what Mary Douglas foreword reminded me about and thereby replacing the growing feeling of despair with a warm and fuzzy, tinkling feeling of returning to my roots and at the same time moving forward.
I’m facing a challenge. Luckily wiser men and women have trotted the path before. She has. So has he. And they discuss it.
I’m talking about the struggle for legitimation, the struggle of how to convince managers and executives that humans and relations make up a bigger sum than the sum of single parts put together. And that it is that surplus that can translate into social capital depending on how it is managed. And that in the end social capital has an effect on competition and innovation strategies. And thereby effecting the bottom line as well. Not to mention the hardship in convincing anybody that they ought to have their organization investigated, the social relations analyzed, and the social capital measured.
I’m guessing that I have already lost readers by now. And those readers are not even potentiel buyers. Imagine that I stood in front of an audience of potential clients and I outlined the argument as above. I wouldn’t even make it to explaining what a relation is before being accused of living in an ivory tower.
I’m adressing the problem of language and presentation when you refuse to resort to simplified, reductionist models that I expect is valued by corporate culture. How to be convincing on complex topics such as networks? How to be taken seriously on complex topics such as relations? How to transform complexity into an argument of dynamacy? These are questions that make up my challenge #1.
Some years ago as a student I stumbled upon the work of renowned corporate anthropologist Dr. Karen Stephenson. It was one of the first times I was exposed to applied business anthropology. Amongst my peers words such as business, private enterprise, and capital as accumulated stock were concepts more exotic than (yet strangely related to) Zande’s believe in witchcraft. As we eagerly took to disapproval of the ethics of an anthropologist working for imperialist capitalism I thought that the business path was sealed off properly.
History happened and a while ago I came across Karen Stephenson once again. This time around I’m actually well inspired by her thoughts on knowledge capital. I would like the idea:
“… that things actually work much differently, and sometimes at complete odds with the formal apparatus, leads us to a discovery of a second world, burried beneath the first” (Stephenson 2005: 263)
to be the one of the backdrops of the next months, as that second world which consists of informal networks will be the centre point of my work. Dr. Stephenson’s method of data collection is something I need to study closer. However I’m not sure the inspiration will go that far. Furthermore I’m way more radical than she is when it comes to the believe that knowledge doesn’t reside as an object in neither individuals nor networks, but is created as it is performed in relations between humans, objects, and phenomena. Thereby rendering relations even more important as it is “what goes on in the relations” that create knowledge. More on that later. For now Karen Stephenson and her work on knowledge capital, the importance of networks, and relation stimulating technology is a great source of inspiration
Further reading: Karen Stephenson’s publications
