It is not only a complicated but also long-term mission to implement the information system and system project. It involves a variety of interior and exterior problems, such as the supporting from decision management, users' resistance, conflict between departments, leadership of project members, outsourcing¡¦s cooperation, supporting of develop tools (Software & Hardware) and cooperation of supply chain. Therefore, we have defined the social network of the CIO as seven dimensions, which are CEO, users, cross dept. chiefs, MIS dept. employees, Supplies & Clients, Outsourcings & Consultant and Software/Hardware supplies. The research tries to approach the topics from the angle of observer, starting from the social network of the CIO, by case study method, to process the detailed data analysis through a great different of CIO interviews. Thus we may find out and realize the circumstance CIO may faced and the phenomenal incurred in intercourse with the others, which intends to explore that CIO faces the challenge & response while they are trying to push information system in the enterprise. We also take the perspective of Social Capital consists of three dimensions which are structural dimension, cognitive dimension and relational dimension combined as a analyzing perspective to interpret and analyze how the CIO create and take advantage of his social capital to solve problems and achieve the goal eventually. The first finding of the research is that the social network of the CIO was suitable and practicable analyzing perspective based on the three dimensions of social capital theory; secondly, the communication between the correspondents of the CIO social network and CEO is the most importance and the most difficulty as well. The enterprise culture, background, CIO network structure have the influence on intercourse benefit. It is inter-supported with the three dimensions of the social capital. We hereby hope to achieve the following progresses with the research: 1. The reference to the qualified candidate of the CIO to an enterprise. 2. Target on the managers of information management and offer them a brief and simple analyzing perspective, in order to make an accurate diagnose & analysis to the problems. 3. The enterprise could take advantage of social capital to impulse the information system, so that it may reduce information management from any cognitive difference, conflicts between interfaces and get promotion of the service quality of the information department.

The purpose of this research was to study the influence of strong and weak social network ties on the phenomenon of bullying by examining the social ties leading to, or preventing bullying. Social ties were examined in relation to bullying, to establish the risk and protective factors associated with the structures of existing social networks. The study answered the research question: How does the strength of social ties relate to the phenomenon of bullying experienced by Grade 4 learners in a school environment? The secondary research questions addressed by the study were: What types of social ties are prevalent in bullies' and victims' networks? How do social ties act as protective factors when regarding bullying for the Grade 4 victims and bullies? How do social ties act as risk factors when regarding bullying for the Grade 4 victims and bullies? Social capital theory formed the basis of the theoretical framework. This study made use of an interpretivist paradigm, and employed a qualitative approach. This study was conducted using an exploratory, embedded case study design. One-on-one, semi-structured interviews, observations and reflexive journal were used to gather data. The data was analysed using thematic content analysis. Bullies were found to have more weak network ties than victims. Weak ties are largely necessary for the exchange of resources across networks, leading to greater diversity and variety of information, thus increasing access to social capital. Future research recommendations included a mixed-methods study, as well as an examination of the longevity of bullying and social network status. Recommendations included interventions aimed at reducing the incidences of bullying through addressing unrealised assets within social networks, and the wider social context, alongside teacher training. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Educational Psychology / MEd / Unrestricted

The purpose of this study is to explore Black women’s experience of becoming and being entrepreneurs and accumulating wealth. Through interview questions that examine social capital, this study allows eight Black women to recall their ever-changing and evolving experience of entrepreneurship and economic mobility. This qualitative study goes beyond empirical data of the wealth gap and the numerical trends of Black women entrepreneurs. The study allowed for Black women to share their experience with wealth accumulation and the social factors, such as networks and relationships that attributed to starting and sustaining a business. Findings and implications will be discussed.

Purpose - Healthcare (HC) is a globally expensive investment, suffering from service quality, due to medical errors caused by physicians’ poor decisions making (DM). Current published literature: (1) encourages clinical DM research to reduce diagnostic errors and (2) stresses on the dearth of means for practitioners’ knowledge shared DM; this research focuses on knowledge sharing for improving medical DM quality through physicians’ social capital (SC) in a virtual community of practice (VCoP). Physicians join a virtual community (VC) to share clinical practice knowledge to aid medical DM. This study aims to assess the effect of physicians’ SC on medical DM and assess the mediating role of knowledge sharing quality, between physicians’ SC and medical DM quality since research lacks to investigate the impact of knowledge management (KM) tools in a HC context. VCoP is a KM tool and medical DM quality is a HC topic of this study. Design/methodology/approach – This positivist, quantitative research utilizes non-experimental survey to empirically assess its conceptual framework. After attaining an ethical approval, from Brunel Business School Research Ethics Committee, online survey was pre-tested and pilot tested for clarity and validity. 10 non-physician Ph.D. academics voluntarily participated during the survey’s pre-test phase. The survey was amendment for its pilot study phase; conducted in “plastic surgery yahoo group” VC. 31 physician VC members voluntarily participated. Again, the survey was amended and distributed for main data collection from 204 voluntary SurveyMonkey’s VC’s physician members. Findings – Data was analysed using SPSS 20 and LISREL 8.80 by means of confirmatory factor analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. Empirical findings supported this study’s four main hypotheses as well as supported this study’s initially proposed conceptual framework. Originality/value – This study customized the Honeycomb framework to establish a definition of professional physicians; HC VCs followed by identifying 51 VCs from social networking platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. This study also fulfilled its aim and hence proposed a structurally fit conceptual framework.

Magister Artium - MA / Cape Town has arguably the most diversified urban agriculture sector across the country. Nevertheless, the desired gains of urban agriculture are barely realized. The organization of urban agriculture, specifically the nature in which urban farmers are organized in relation to supporting actors, is identified as a significant factor in influencing the success of the activity. Surprisingly, the literature on the organization of urban farmers and supporting actors in Cape Town is scanty. It is on this basis that this study aimed to investigate the organization of urban farmers and their relationship with supporting actors in Mitchells Plain. Informed by the social capital theory, a case-study approach was employed where both the qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis were utilized to meet the study objectives. A random sampling technique was used in the selection of the 60 respondents for a questionnaire survey. Purposive sampling was employed to select the key informant respondents which included knowledgeable urban farmers, Non-Governmental Organization officials, a Research official and a Provincial Department of Agriculture official. Secondary data collection was achieved through a systematic review of scholarly literature and policy documents. The statistical software IBM SPSS 25 was employed to process and analyze quantitative data through descriptive and inferential techniques. For qualitative data, thematic analysis was conducted to process the transcribed interviews whilst a hermeneutic approach was used to analyze secondary data. The study findings show that urban farmers are organized into loose and largely fragmented informal networks within Mitchells Plain. Although these forms of networks in their current state are beneficial to household farmers, community farmers require more formal networks to operate optimally and receive resources beyond non-governmental organization assistance. Moreover, the study discovered a lack of meaningful coordination of activities between the supporting actors involved in urban farming initiatives which militate against the success of urban agriculture activities in the community. Consequently, the study recommends that supporting actors need to develop functional partnerships to enhance the impact of urban agriculture activities. Also, community farmers are encouraged to affiliate with formal networks while household farmers simply need to enhance informal networking amongst themselves to improve activity coordination and resource access from supporting actors.

Guanxi plays an important role in Chinese entrepreneurial networking activities, especially for micro entrepreneurial firms in China. Due to limited information and resources available to micro firms, micro firms are more dependent on entrepreneurs’ guanxi networks to get access to the necessary resources. Previous literatures have particularly discussed the impacts of guanxi networks for foreigners successfully doing business in China. Nevertheless, there are scant literatures that study on the role of the guanxi in Chinese entrepreneurship. The purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of the role of guanxi in Chinese entrepreneurship. This study employs the relevant guanxi concepts, Western social capital theory, and network-based entrepreneurship as the main conceptual framework to examine how Chinese entrepreneurs utilize their guanxi networks during the development of micro firms. Furthermore, this study is based on ten case studies in China. Empirical Data are collected from semi-structured interviews with ten Chinese entrepreneurs in micro firms. The results show that guanxi networks are highly important for Chinese entrepreneurs to develop their business. Firstly, Chinese entrepreneurs make use of different guanxi governance mechanisms--qinqing, renqing and jiaoqing to acquire different information and resources for the development of their firms. The obtained information and resources constitute the social capital, which can be used to complement insufficient capital within the firms. Secondly, Chinese entrepreneurs intentionally enlarge their guanxi network size to obtain more resources. Moreover, Chinese entrepreneurs benefit from strong guanxi ties and closure network structures to obtain the cohesive social capital. While Chinese entrepreneurs gain greater benefits from weak guanxi ties and spare network structures for acquiring additional information, resources and business opportunities. Thirdly, guanxi-networking activities are different from Western social networking activities, as guanxi-networking activities put more emphasize on keeping harmony and mutual reciprocity. Furthermore, Chinese entrepreneurs are proactive to build and maintain guanxi networks through various approaches for their business development. Lastly, even though guanxi networks play important roles in the development of micro entrepreneurial firms, they cannot be sustainable competitive advantage in the long term. Indeed, the core competences such as high quality of products and services, advanced technologies and marketing channels could be sustainable competitive advantages for the entrepreneurial firms in today’s increasingly fierce competitive market.

This study deals with immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands. Scholars have recognized low level of political participation of immigrants in Sweden compared to the Netherlands. The main goal of this study is to analyze the institutional influence, mainly from political parties over immigrants’ motivation for active electoral participation. The modified actor-context model uses here as the main theoretical framework. In addition, social capital theory employs to analyze immigrants’ voluntary organizational membership. This study confirms that, Swedish immigrants have the lower participation rate in the political sphere, at lest to a certain extent, than its counterparts the Dutch immigrants. This study also confirms the argument that contextual factors can influence actor’s motivations in integration-oriented action, and similarly it validates the necessity of enlargement of the actor-context model.

The importance of control in information system development (ISD) project has been widely emphasized. However, most studies focused on formal control and relative few efforts haven been entered to understand the effect of information control. In addition for those studies focus on informal control only viewed this issue from team level perspective. Drawing on the limitations of past studies, this study attempted to query possible antecedents of clan control effectiveness from aspect of the social control theory. In particular, we focus on the effects of personal beliefs, project commitment, team attachment and involvement on the compliance of individuals on group norm. We hypothesized that social bonds lead to compliance as well as extra-role behaviors for individuals within project team. Based on survey data collected from 205 members of ISD project teams. The results confirmed the hypothesized relationship between social bonds and compliance. The analysis also reveals that three factors, including personal beliefs, project commitment, and involvement are associated with external-role behavior. The results of this study can not only serve as a reference for future researches but also generate implications for practitioners.

With the common adoption of the Internet and Web in the recent years, the WOM has been changed to electronic WOM (e- WOM). E-WOM is the positive or negative statements made about a product, company, or media personality that are made widely available via the Internet. It has become an important source of information for the consumer to make decisions including purchase and more and more people have noticed the importance of its applications. The goal of this research is to investigate ¡§message passing along behavior intention¡¨ (MPBI) by using Social Cognitive Theory and Social Capital Theory from the viewpoints of people and environment. We use survey method to collect the data and use PLS to analyze it. And the results reveal that when people passing message along to others, they care about how close these messages are with them instead of how correct these messages are. It implies that MPBI has the nature of daily life, and therefore, people will be more willing to pass daily life messages. Besides, individuals tend to pass along messages to people who have substantial relationship with him/her. We also found people pass message along to people not for reputation but for expressing their affections to others. In addition, message passing Self-efficacy is also important to MPBI. We also classified MPBI into two types ¡X the one is hedonic and the other is utilitarian. The results indicate that people have different behavioral pattern when they deal with different kind of MPBI. In sum, MPBI is a channel for people to maintain the relationship with others and the findings of this study provides some suggestions for the e-WOM research.

Certain properties of individuals’ social networks within their organizations are known to be associated with benefits. However, these properties are not universally beneficial for all individuals. To explain the differing utility of social connections for different actors, network research has tended to focus on factors relating to the actor’s characteristics, agency and cognition. With this dissertation, I explore a different contingency affecting actors’ abilities to leverage their networks: how observers perceive and evaluate the behavior of actors as they craft and use their networks, and how these attributions impact actors’ job performance. I develop a theoretical framework that incorporates social capital theory to develop a taxonomy of networking behaviors. I build upon network cognition research to explore how observers’ perceptions and attributions of actors’ networking behaviors rather than perceptions of network ties or structure affect actors’ outcomes. I draw upon attribution theory to suggest how observers’ attributions about actors may affect observers’ behavior towards actors, thus impacting actors’ outcomes. Results suggest that networking behaviors that are seen as serving the collective positively impact actors’ outcomes, while networking behaviors that are seen as self-serving negatively impact the actors’ outcomes by limiting access to high-status friends. However, attributions about an actor’s self-serving behavior augment the benefits the actor receives when he or she has access to high-status friends. When it comes to performance, networks matter, but it also matters how observers evaluate actors’ networking behaviors.