Mobilization Of Social Capital Research Articles

Widening participation between 2001 and 2021: A systematic literature review and research agenda

Widening participation has been a vehicle to facilitate access and support towards the successful completion of university studies for underrepresented groups who are less likely to pursue higher education. Yet, despite its widely accepted importance and adoption across countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, studies to date remain largely fragmented – often employed through the lens of a single institution, or a particular priority group. Amidst this backdrop, universities and other higher education providers are increasingly probed as to their role in supporting social capital mobility, of which widening participation plays a vital component in delivering wider societal imperatives. In addition, the COVID-19 effect has worsened university participation and completion rates, as the global pandemic has placed vulnerable students (often those involved in widening participation initiatives) in more precocious conditions than ever before. Nevertheless, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review comprising 102 journal articles that derive 15 meta-themes to provide a timely introspection of widening participation, show key trends over time, and chart future areas of investigation for scholars and practitioners in this space.

The spectrum of inter-organizational relationships and social capital mobilization of MNEs

Propósitolas Empresas Multinacionales (MNEs) establecen una amplia gama de alianzas para acceder a los recursos críticos externos que puedan necesitar en cualquier memento. Las MNEs deben considerar qué mecanismos o características de las relaciones facilitan su movilización real.Diseño/metodología/enfoqueuna definición de los tipos de alianza produjo los parámetros para una regresión de mínimos cuadrados ordinarios de una muestra de las principales MNEs de alcance global de la industria de las aerolíneas.ResultadosLos resultados mostraron que ciertos tipos de alianzas favorecieron la movilización real del capital social.Originalidad/valorAnalizar los factores que influyen en el grado de movilización del capital social y cómo las MNEs utilizan en la práctica los recursos de sus socios, requiere del establecimiento de un marco teórico y el desarrollo de evidencia empírica.

Social capital and SMEs resilience in the context of Covid-19

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) share a majority and play an important role in the socio-economic development of national and well as regional economies. However, they are more vulnerable to adverse changes due to the limited resources. The Covid-19 pandemic which started in the year 2020 has seriously challenged the SMEs operation. Their resilience becomes the first priority under this specific circumstance. This research was conducted to explore the factors affecting the resilience of SMEs in Ho Chi Minh City. By employing PLS-SEM on the data of 300 surveyed businesses, the effects of three key factors: leadership, human capital and social capital on SMEs resilience have been investigated. The findings reveals the signficant impacts of social capital, leadership and human capital on the SMEs resilience, especially in the context of Covid-19. The study results highlight that social capital mobilization should be prioritized for SMEs to promote their resilience in short term.

Cultural Resources and Mobilization of Social Capital: The Case of Finding a Job

By combining the latest knowledge from cultural sociology and social network theories, a hypothesis is posed regarding the association between cultural consumption and social capital mobilization. On the classic example of looking for work, an assumption was made that persons who prefer or engage in a larger number of cultural forms (the so‐called omnivores) have greater chances to find work through social contacts than through any other methods or may count on social support when looking for job, and this relationship is stronger for non‐family than for family ties. These arguments are tested with the use of survey data collected in Poland in 2017 on a locally representative sample of adult residents aged 18–75. The results support the hypotheses and additionally show that people with different cultural profiles differ in their capacity to access and mobilize social resources. While participation in both highbrow and popular culture is efficacious, not all forms of the popular one are positively related to social resources. The article is closed with some concluding remarks, limitations of the study, and guidelines for future research.

Reason-giving for resistance: obfuscation, justification and earmarking in resisting informal financial assistance

Abstract Monetary assistance is a common request from social ties and can be both an economic lifeline and a financial burden. This study examines the relational work at the heart of such exchanges, examining when and how attempts at mobilizing informal financial assistance are resisted. Using qualitative data from West African factory workers, we demonstrate that individuals who wish to resist the provision of assistance without causing relational damage employ rhetorical strategies designed to justify or obfuscate their refusal, relying heavily on socially legitimate reason-giving. The findings reveal that subjective calculations of resource availability are central to the mobilization of assistance, resistant givers differentiate between justification and obfuscation of refusals, and earmarks can play a role in protecting resources from social demands. More broadly, these findings suggest ways that a differential ability to resist social capital mobilization may generate inequalities within social groups.

Let it go or let it grow? – Personal network development and the mobilization of intra-organizational social capital

We investigate how differences in personal network development affect the mobilization of social capital for new organizational members. Analyzing three waves of panel data reported by 24 newcomers in nine organizations, we ask whether the kind and volume of resources derived by focal actors depends rather on changes in the composition or in the size of their intra-organizational networks. We find that change in network composition predicts an increase in social capital mobilization over time. Network growth is found to reduce the affective resources that newcomers mobilize. Implications for subsequent research and organizational socialization practices are discussed.

Bonding social capital and political participation: the mediating role of political interest

ABSTRACT There have been inconsistent results regarding the effect of bonding social capital (SC). Drawing upon SC theory and mobilization literature, this study not only explores whether horizontal and vertical forms of bonding SC predict political participation in different directions, but also assesses how they influence political participation through political interest. The mediation analysis of structural equation modeling is used to analyze a representative adult sample in Taiwan. The results show that vertical bonding SC is associated with the conventional and unconventional forms of political participation, while horizontal bonding SC is not. Vertical, rather than horizontal, bonding SC is positively related to political interest. This study identifies the relevance of political interest in mediating the association between vertical bonding SC and political participation. These results suggest that failure to distinguish between the two types of bonding SC may partially contribute to the inconsistency of prior results.

Did the screens win? An autoregressive model linking leisure, relatedness and mental health

While it is well known that sport and exercise are beneficial for physiological and neurological functioning, leisure has received less attention as a means of mobilizing social networks and cultivating relatedness as factors protecting mental health. Using a sample of 8148 cases from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), we built an autoregressive cross-lagged model to determine how offline and online leisure is related to perceptions of support from relatives and friends (relatedness), and with an indicator of psychological distress across a span of three years (2015–2018). Our findings show that pre-existing psychological distress leads to greater engagement in online leisure, such as browsing the Internet and online chatting, which is alleged to be due to social anhedonia. However, we do not find evidence that screen-use activities per se lead to mental distress over time. By contrast, engagement in both offline leisure and face-to-face interactions appears to be a key mechanism in activating those processes of social capital mobilization that help cultivate feelings of relatedness and are associated with better mental health. These findings suggest that more attention is needed to distinguish those who avoid engagement in face-to-face interactions from screen-users per se. Hopefully, this will stimulate the creation of novel theoretical frameworks capable of addressing this subject during the global pandemic, in which computers are playing a crucial role in maintaining social ties.

Alliance Network Diversity and Social Capital Mobilization an Empirical Study of the Global Airline Industry

Firms establish a presence in a wide range of alliances to access the critical resources that they may need at any one time. Although inter-organizational relationships constitute the channels through which social capital flows, firms should consider which mechanisms or characteristics of the relations facilitate their actual mobilization. Accordingly, the final purpose of alliances cannot simply be potential access to partner resources, it must also be their real use. A definition of alliance types yielded the parameters for an ordinary least squares regression of a sample from top international airline databases. The results showed that certain kind of alliances favored the actual mobilization of social capital. Accordingly, cooperation as a structural organizational form, and in particular certain types of alliances such as global or multilateral, makes it easier to cope with increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments -VUCA conditions.

Accessibility and Mobilisation of Social Capital in First-Generation Students’ Social Networks—A Mixed-Methods Approach

Social support is a crucial factor for first-generation students’ (FGS) integration at university and their educational success. FGS are often assumed to lack social support and integration, but research shows mixed results. By means of a mixed-methods approach (combination of interviews and online survey), we aimed to shed light on the characteristics in FGS social networks that classify them as high-quality networks in order to obtain a deeper understanding of the structure and setup of the social contexts from which FGS receive support. Using these characteristics, we constructed types of socially supported students and related them to academic success. For that, we conducted N = 40 semi-structured interviews linked to Qualitative Social Network Analysis at an urban German University. Prior to the interviews, the interviewees filled out an online survey (1) consisting of demographic variables and psychological scales. During the interviews (2), we followed a problem-centred interview approach for the first part and then (3) asked about the FGS’s support networks during the beginning of their bachelor’s degrees. All the interviews were coded by applying content analysis. Network maps were analysed using qualitative structural analysis (QSA). Both maps and codes were used to build three types of support as received by the students. These types were in turn connected to the results of the support forms in content analysis and the psychometric scales to estimate how students perceive different structures in their networks as supportive. The results revealed three types: small and dense bijou networks, medium networks with emotionally close alters (close-knit networks), and large and diverse networks (have-it-all networks). The types show different results for university success and perceived support for their networks.

What a Small Group of People Can(’t) Do

A growing body of scholars in natural resources management have called for the examination of the roles of social capital and social networks in the effective maintenance of community-based projects. Yet, the role of social capital in collective action cannot be effectively understood without studying agency. The goal of this study is to examine how agents’ individual characteristics and their structural social capital, along with broader cognitive social capital elements, shape possibilities for empowerment at the community level. Drawing from an embedded comparative case study of two community-based ecotourism projects in Ghana, we employed a mixed-methods approach combining Lin’s social capital model and Krishna’s agency model to identify and characterize legitimate agents of change in each community, as well as to evaluate the structure of their discussion and nomination networks (i.e., structural social capital). Differences between communities in the network structure of agents, as well as in their types and levels of engagement, resourcefulness, visions and perceptions of socio-ecological context, exposed key barriers to social capital mobilization. Overall, our results indicate that greater community empowerment is reported where greater community trust and a greater cohesiveness of agents with access to external resources are reported. Altogether, this study adds to past efforts in illustrating how a mixed-methods examination of change agents in a CBNRM setting can surface internal opportunities for and constraints on social capital mobilization toward community empowerment.

Socially Included or Excluded? The Role of Social Capital among Filipino Labour Migrants

This article focuses on how social capital is mobilisable and usable for Filipino labour migrants in their efforts to become part of the Finnish labour market. Drawing on the argument of Anthias that not all kinds of resources enable social capital, this article also reveals the dominant role of the minority church as a provider of support simultaneously confining its members’ inclusion to the destination society. The article demonstrates how mobilisation of social capital is possible only in certain socioeconomic context, for example, when social ties transfer usable resources for the actors, such as information and access to a new job, whereas in other cases, the social ties chiefly provide non-mobilisable resources, such as emotional support and solidarity. However, these resources can be of advantage for strengthening the ethnic identity of migrants.

Mobilising Social Capital in Healthcare Industry of Pakistan

This study intended to learn the mobilization of social capital for the access to better health care facilities emphasizing the role of religiosity culture and social identity. Social capital was limited to religiosity culture and the social identity using the bonding and bridging concepts for this study. The three variables gauged in the study were social capital, religiosity culture and social identity which are barely used for the health care industry. The target population was public health care practitioners of the Federal Capital with sample size of 215 doctors and nurses over a period of six months. The data was quantitative and analyzed through co-relational tests. Questionnaire was developed for the study using the validity and reliability statistics. However, the results from the study reflected the significant impact of religiosity culture and social identity. Thus, it was concluded that positive and negative externalities affect the social identity in the creation of social capital. The findings of this study can provide a framework for future reference and to the policy makers in enhancing the social responsibility through mobilization of social capital of healthcare professionals in the industry.

Entrepreneurial Social Capital Support on the Growth of Small Holder Rural Farmers: Augmenting Livelihoods in Honde Valley, Zimbabwe

This research presents specific insights on entrepreneurial social capital support on the growth of rural small holder farmers to augment livelihoods in Zimbabwe. The smallholder farmers continue to employ every season of the year. The study sought to investigate the impact of entrepreneurial social capital support on small holder rural farmers’ growth in Honde Valley, Zimbabwe. This was motivated by the need to fillup the academic gap on the entrepreneurial social capital support on the growth of agrarian small holder rural farmers. In order to achieve the study objective, a crosssectional survey was carried out using questionnaires and a purposive random sampling technique of 50 rural small holder farmers was considered reliable. The data was collected and analyzed using the statistical packages for social sciences software (SPSS). The findings were presented using both tabular and graphical presentations. Statistics in the study demonstrate that entrepreneurial social capital support augment Livelihoods in Zimbabwe and it’s a means of raising small holder farmer working capital and contribute to their growth. The main reason for entrepreneurial social capital support was for expansion and growth of small holder farmer businesses. This method explains why most rural small holder farmers do not rely on formal borrowing. Finally the businesses that received social capital reported growth .The study recommended that government should set a policy to promote entrepreneurial social capital support systems. From research, it is clear that there exists a large unexploited method of social capital mobilization and its utilization is potential for the growth of agrarian Small Holder rural Farmers.

Social Capital Inequality and Subjective Wellbeing of Older Chinese

Using longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies, this study provides insights on comparative wellbeing outcomes for older people who are institutionally segregated into clusters that produce uneven social capital. We present the first study that examines how institutionalized social capital inequality, measured by the social capital gap generated by hukou (household registration) status in China, affects the wellbeing of older people. Our results show that high levels of social capital inequality are associated with lower subjective wellbeing, measured by life satisfaction. This general conclusion is robust to a number of sensitivity checks including alternative ways of measuring subjective wellbeing and inequality. We also find that the negative relationship between social capital inequality and subjective wellbeing is strongest for people with a non-urban hukou living in urban areas. Our findings highlight the need for policies aimed at narrowing the social capital gap and the dismantling of institutional structures that hinder upward social capital mobility.

Social Position or School Participation? Access and Mobilization of Social Capital in a School-Based Network

Through school-based networks, parents obtain information, practical help, and other resources. Because networks vary by size and structure, access to these resources is uneven. What accounts for differences in access to social ties and in the mobilization of those ties to provide resources? In this article, we analyze a network of mothers of eighth graders at a Philadelphia public school. With a near-complete census of network ties, we explore mothers’ access to and mobilization of information and practical help through social ties. We find that mothers’ school-based participation, rather than their race or class-based social position, is associated with resource access and mobilization. Importantly, greater levels of participation increase the likelihood that a mother will provide—but not obtain—information and practical help. Our results can help inform public policy and practice on family and community engagement in schools.

El capital social en situaciones de cambio institucional

In this article, the hypothesis according to which the institutional change is determined by the mobilization of social capital is exposed. It is analysed what consequences derived from this fact in relation to the processes of deinstitutionalization of the policy. It proposes an interpretation of academically relevant results about the meaning of the term ‘deinstitutionalization’, explains some of the most important antecedents on institutional theory and, finally, proposes some fundamental ideas to advance the philosophical reflection about the so-called new institutionalism.

Uncovering the Black Box between Social Capital and Career Success: A 3R Model

Social capital can be broadly defined as the resources embedded in the focal individual’s social contacts. In the extant career literature, social capital has been shown to be a strong predictor of career success. However, having social capital is one thing, but being able to use it is another thing. In order to better understand why some individuals have a more successful career than others, it is not only important to examine the resources embedded in their social contacts (i.e., the possession of social capital), it is also important to understand how exactly they reap the benefits of social capital (i.e., the mobilization of social capital). We develop and empirically verify this important distinction by a mixed research design. In the qualitative study, we inductively develop 3Rs of social capital mobilization– retrieval, referral and reproduction. We also revisit the operationalization of social capital itself. In the quantitative study, we measure the whole company network, from CEO to frontline engineers, in a small software company. We then test the degree to which these three Rs mediate the main effect between social capital and career success (i.e., objective salary, promotability and career satisfaction). Theoretical contributions are discussed.

Expanding the two wings of social capital for value creation: strategic entrepreneurship of HTC, 1997–2008

ABSTRACTThis study draws on a historical, qualitative case study to explore how a leading Taiwanese high-tech mobile phone manufacturer, HTC, successfully and continuously manoeuvred the two wings of social capital – that is, structural social capital and cognitive social capital – to create value in its strategic entrepreneurial process between 1997 and 2008. Taiwan is a wide-spreading trust-based Chinese Confucian-influenced culture. The process of developing trust-based social capital for value creation consists of three central actions: identifying potential social capital, reinforcing cognitive social capital, and extending structural social capital. Our findings advance knowledge of trust-based social capital based on the perspective of strategic entrepreneurship for value creation and offer practical implications for the mobilisation of social capital. In sum, we suggest that firms could develop trust-based social capital considering business conditions to reduce possible risks or uncertainties of network management in an international arena.

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND MUTUAL VERSUS PUBLIC BENEFIT: THE CASE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY COOPERATIVES

ABSTRACTOne potential major role of social economy organizations in sustainability transitions is the creation and mobilization of social capital. Yet, the social economy gathers very distinct organizational models which may be associated with different types and levels of social capital. Accordingly, the objective of this article is to explore whether, and if so how, the type and level of social capital differ between mutual benefit organizations – which essentially seek to meet their members’ needs – and public benefit organizations – which seek to enhance the well‐being of a broader community or the society as a whole. The study draws on an econometric analysis of different forms of social capital in two renewable energy cooperatives which are located in Flanders but have clearly divergent orientations toward mutual versus public benefit. The results show that, as compared with an orientation toward public benefit, an orientation toward mutual benefit is associated with lower social identification with the cooperative and weaker ties between members. Our study explores the underlying explanatory mechanisms behind these relationships. Its findings contribute to understanding the potential roles played by cooperatives in sustainability transitions.