Recently, a distinction between cross-cutting (or bridging) and closed (or bonding) networks has been proposed in the social capital literature. One approach to empirically operationalize this distinction builds on connections between voluntary associations through individuals with multiple memberships. However, simply counting the number of members' additional memberships in other associations...

We move beyond the performance returns of individuals’ direct network connections to study the effects of “secondhand” social capital, i.e., from the networks of one’s contacts. We propose that certain colleagues may be more valuable to one’s job performance than others when their spillovers of novel information combine with spillovers of the cooperation needed to obtain that novelty. In a stud...

Current thinking in major international development agencies construes community-based health insurance (CBHI) as a transitional mechanism to achieving universal coverage for health care in lowincome countries. The policy link between CBHI and universal coverage is implicitly determined by the historical experience of mutual health insurance in countries such as Germany and Japan in the 19 cent...

Many organizations are pursuing knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) to offshore locations. Successful KPO requires developing robust inter organizational knowledge management capabilities (KMC). However, “organizational gaps” that originate from (i) structural differences between the client and vendor’s operating procedures and (ii) cultural differences in the cultural proclivity of the individ...

A Computational Framework for Social Capital in Online Communities Matthew S. Smith Department of Computer Science, BYU Doctor of Philosophy Social capital is the value of the relationships we create and maintain within our social networks to gain access to and mobilize needed resources (e.g., jobs, moral support). Quantifying, and subsequently leveraging, social capital are challenging problem...

In the past decade, two topics have generated much interest in the idea of social networks and network analysis. These are social capital, popularised by Robert Putnam, and small-worlds, popularised by Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási. Social capital highlights local processes and network structures, theorizing the ways in which relations and their patterns link individuals and groups to...

Social Contacts and the Economic Performance of Immigrants: A Panel Study of Immigrants in Germany Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examined the impact of social contacts on immigrant occupational status and income. In addition to general social contacts, we also analyzed the effects of bonding (i.e., co-ethnic) and bridging (i.e., interethnic) ties on economic outcomes. Resu...