I work with him. We do our job, and I go home at 5 o’clock. I don’t have to like him!
A few weeks ago I was at a birthday party and I tried to explain to my dinner partner what it is that I do for a living. I told her that I do mini inquiries into social capital in organizations. I interview and observe people, try to determine the state of their relationships, stress problematic areas of communication, and then make recommendations to our software designer. Then we work together to figure out good solutions, and thereby implementing the findings of the inquiries in the design of the software. Or at least that has been the desired process so far, I told her.
The word social capital seemed to stir something in her though. She suddenly looked almost upset and when I finished my rant she asked me “all that talk about relations - do we have to like each other at work in order to be productive, effective, innovative?”. I couldn’t quite figure out what made her upset, but the question I think was meant rhetorically (hence the quote of the beginning of this post). I seriously did not know what to answer her.
Later on I figured maybe her reaction was due to the lack of consistency and content when we talk about relations. We talk a lot about the social web, and how it creates relations, and how those relations create value (although ‘value’ is a very disputed word), but who talks of the nature of relations? Of what they consists of? And what they have to consist of in order to create value?
2 comments so far
Philosophy talks about the first question, but we can easily put that aside, since it is an established fact today that relations are more important than what they connect. The last two questions you can only answer by doing ethnographic work, as I suppose you do, and of course look at what others have done. I think a lot of the research on social media, and more generally sociology, anthropology and cultural studies of technology, examines exactly that kind of questions. The problem that springs to mind though is how to translate or transfer knowledge from one area to another. Most of the studies done on social media is concerned with young people in their everyday life setting, and those findings are not easily transferred into organizations; that is, there are no meta-kind-of-sociality that will ‘work’ in every culture.
Organizations are small cultures, if we allow culture to be part of specific work tasks that needs to be performed locally or globally. Hence, and I’m pretty sure you agree, when you want to support the performance of specific tasks within an organization, you have to do ethnographic work and design specific solutions. One of the reasons that it today makes sense to talk about social capital in organizations that can be enabled and supported through the use of software, is because we have begun to use other and more flexible languages to code our social software with. That is, it can easily be adjusted to the culture and social mechanisms within specific organizations = enable specific local (and global structures).
Value is as you say a problematic term, because we have so many different forms of capital and therefore different forms of value, that are not easily translated into one another. But that does not mean you cannot foster economic growth through the deployment of social capital strategically, but just cannot put it into a mathematical formula. But you can do it locally based on information from and about the specific organization.
You know that I agree that ethnographic work is the only way to answer the last two questions. The first one: Well I suppose I haven’t expressed myself very well. Alot of the literature I have been reading about social capital (not Bourdieu, but James Coleman, Robert Putnam and so on) argues that social capital is effected by the nature of relations eg. reciprocity and trust. And I gues what I meant was that what does reciprocity means? Do you have to like your colleague in order to establish reciprocity?
I agree that it isn’t easy to transfer knowledge from one setting to another when there’s no meta-kind-of-sociality, but what you can transfer at least for comparative reasons is what you gain of theoretical insights from places such as teens in social media, but also from shamans’ rituals in Western Canada…what I’m trying to say is, that when you can’t generalize from your quantitative findings (when you don’t have any) what you need to do is to generalize theoretically.