Social Capital and Structural Holes
Christopher McCarty
October 16, 2012
Alejandro Portes (1998) SOCIAL CAPITAL: Its Origins and Applications
in Modern Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology 1998. 24:1–24
• “…the ability of actors to secure benefits by
virtue of membership in social networks or other
social structures”
• “During recent years, the concept of social
capital has become one of the most popular
exports from sociological theory into everyday
language.”
• “… the point is approaching at which social
capital comes to be applied to so many
events and in so many different contexts as
to lose any distinct meaning.”
Origin of Term ‘Social Capital’
• West Virginia rural educator
• Hanifan, L. J. (1916). "The Rural School
Community Center". Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social
Science (67): 130–138.
Origins of concept
• Captures ideas of capital from sociology since
Durkheim and Marx
• What makes it different?
– Focus on the positive effects of relations (although
there are certainly negatives)
– By describing it as capital it opens the door for
economic analysis
– It represents a non-monetary resource for
policymakers
How does social capital differ from
economic capital?
• Both are fungible (can be exchanged)
• Social capital exchange is less transparent
• Obligations and violations of reciprocity
are more difficult to recognize and enforce
Pierre Bourdieu
• Considered one of the first to clearly articulate the concept
• Recognized two parts to social capital
– The relationships that provide access to resources
– The quality of those relationships
•
Bourdieu P. 1979. Les trois états du capital culturel. Actes Rech. Sci. Soc.
30:3-6
•
Bourdieu P. 1985. The forms of capital. In Handbook of Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. JG Richardson, pp. 241-58.
New York: Greenwood
James Coleman
• Coleman is responsible for popularizing
the concept in American sociology
• He saw dense networks as a precondition
of social capital
• He introduced the concept of closure
(cohesion) as a measure of norms which
guide the exchange of social capital
Sources of social capital
• Consummatory (contractual)
– Norms for repaying contracts and obeying
laws
• Instrumental
– Accumulation of obligations (social chits)
Putnam
• Putnam focuses on consumatory:
– social capital means “features of social organizations,
such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate
action and cooperation for mutual benefit.”
• This is the social capital as measured by the
World Bank
Potential negative consequences of
social capital
• Exclusion of outsiders
• Excess claims on group members (free-riding
from family members)
• Restrictions on individual freedoms (current
debate about economy and restrictions on
financial institutions)
• Downward-leveling norms (crabs in a bucket)
Social Capital as Security
(Focus on Group)
• Protection (World Bank
and Putnam)
• Certainty at the expense
of constraint and
obligations
• Typically at the level of
the community
• Network closure
• High density, cohesion,
and redundancy
• Leads to protection,
cooperation, and sense of
belonging but involves
obligations and restrictive
norms
Circularity critique
• As a property of communities and nations rather
than individuals, social capital is simultaneously
a cause and an effect
• “if your town is “civic,” it does civic things; if it is
“uncivic,” it does not.
• “The journey was fast, explaining major social
outcomes by relabeling them with a novel term
and then employing the same term to formulate
sweeping policy prescriptions.”
Social Capital as Opportunity
(Focus on Individual)
• Opportunity (Burt, Lin
and Others)
• Low density, low
redundancy,
extensive, complex
• Power, influence,
• Network brokerage
money, advancement,
access, advantage,
• Leads to control (e.g.,
etc.
information),
entrepreneurial
opportunities, etc.
Network mediated benefit
• Stratification leads to:
– access to employment (Granovetter)
– mobility through occupational ladders (Burt)
– entrepreneurial success
• Nan Lin’s surveys measure stratification
• Both Bourdieu and Burt focus on instrumental
social capital, although Burt (and Granovetter)
see social capital in less dense ties
Closure versus Brokerage
Closure
•
Proponents: Coleman, Putnam,
World Bank
•
Level: Group (typically at the level
of the community)
•
Leads to: Protection, cooperation,
and sense of belonging but
involves obligations and restrictive
norms
•
Measures: High density, cohesion,
and redundancy
Brokerage
• Proponents: Burt, Lin
• Level: Individual
• Leads to: Power, influence,
money, advancement, access,
advantage
• Measures: Low density, low
redundancy, high betweenness
Structural Holes and Good Ideas
(Ron Burt, American Journal of Sociology, 2004)
• Hypothesis: People who stand near the holes in a social
structure are at higher risk of having good ideas
• Biochemist Alex Zaffaroni: “He is reading and thinking
very widely. He is totally unafraid of any new technology
in any area of human creativity. He has wonderful
contacts with people in many different areas, so he sees
the bridges between otherwise disparate fields.”
• Social capital exists where people have an advantage
because of their location in a social structure
Within a company
• Managers are promoted as rewards for
having good ideas
• Managers with good ideas tend to be
brokers within the structure of the
company
• Good ideas emerge from the intersection
of social worlds
Structural Holes
(Figure 1 from Burt 2004)
Network Constraint
• Measure of the extent to which the people
a respondent knows are tied to each other
• High constraint means the network is
redundant and recycles information
• Low constraint = bridging between groups
= good ideas
Borgatti’s critique
Borgatti, Stehpen P. (1997) Structural Holes: Unpacking
Burt’s Redundancy Measures. Connections 20(1):35-38
• Many of Burt’s measures are strongly correlated to
existing measures (e.g. network size, degree)
• There is a problem comparing Effective Size across
networks as the ego networks are of different size
• Some of the measures do not do a good job of
representing what they are supposed to represent
• The concept of structural holes is still sound
Four levels of brokerage
•
Level 1
–
•
Level 2
–
•
Transferring best practices from one group to another
Level 3
–
•
Make people on both sides aware of the interests and difficulties in the other
Draw analogies between groups ostensibly irrelevant to one another (difficult for people who
have spent a long time in a group because they use differences to justify continuing their
behavior on the basis that the other group is a different context)
Level 4
–
Synthesis
•
A setting dependent on formal chains of command for communication is a
setting rich in opportunities to coordinate directly across the formal chains
•
Age is often negatively associated with new ideas – why?
David Krackhardt – The Ties That Torture:
Simmellian Tie Analysis in Organizations
Additional points
• “Structural holes and brokerage can be
found in almost any task, depending on
point of view.”
• “Networks do not act, they are a context
for action.”
• Ideas may not be desirable
Women Gang Data
Can you create an environment
rich in structural holes?
• “This is not creativity born of genius; it is creativity as an
import-export business. An idea mundane in one group
can be a valuable insight in another.”
• ASU experimentation with interdisciplinary degrees and
attempts to create new ways of thinking
– Old ways of defining departments lead to redundant thinking
– Erasing lines allows structural holes to form and new ideas to
emerge
– Could this happen with old departmental definitions
– Are there unpredictable consequences to this?
Structural hole analysis of
Padgett data
• Effective Size
– Number of alters minus the average degree of non-ego alters
• Constraint
– Extent to which ego’s alters tend to be tied to each other
• Hierarchy
– Extent to which constraint is concentrated in a single alter
Structural hole analysis of class
data
Structural hole analysis of
Individual data