Network Dynamics of Social Capital

Social capital designs the ensemble of resources which are accessible to a social actor through its relationship with other actors [1]. As such, social capital is always embedded in a social network, where nodes represent actors (e.g. individuals, political groups, associations), and links represent relationships (e.g., friendship, common interests, hostility) [2]. Social networks are inherently dynamic: over time, new actors enter the scene while old ones leave, and relationships among them change continuously. Intuitively, the dynamics of the network will be related to the characteristics of the individual actors involved, and of the links among them, but also of the larger society in which they take part. Shedding light on the interplay among local and global features and network dynamics may therefore be crucial to improving our understanding of social phenomena. Researchers studying complex networks have found that simple rules of interaction among nodes can produce the complex, dynamic networks that can be observed in various fields, at very different spatial and temporal scales. In different research communities, the paradigm of dynamic networks is emerging as one of the most promising research topics [3]. A particularly promising direction of research is that on actor-based models of network dynamics [4], where the parameters governing the evolution of the network are estimated as a function of local and global characteristics of the network itself: such models could in principle be used not only to explain why a given network is observed, but also to predict how it can evolve further, or react to exogenous or endogenous effects. They would therefore represent a powerful tool for analyzing and interpreting social network data, and validating hypothesis on social capital. We intend to use generative models to study the interplay among social networks and social capital, taking social capital of ethnic minority groups as a case study [5, 6, 7], modeling the dynamics of the networks observed. We will focus in particular on the dynamics of interlocking directorates [8] of ethnic and