Contemporary debates about collective action in civil society have given prominent place to the connections between voluntary associations and social capital. Social capital research, however, commonly over-emphasises the role of associations in generating societal-level outcomes, to the neglect of the specific contexts in which associations reside and the different opportunities individuals and groups have to access resources for and through collective action. Also largely ignored are considerations of gender. This thesis addresses these issues, presenting evidence from a case study of a large women???s service organisation ??? the VIEW Clubs of Australia ??? to examine how social capital and women???s agency intersect. The thesis adopts a social-structural approach to social capital, highlighting its role as a resource brokered through networks that both enable and constrain action. This approach attends to the inter-relations of particular types of social capital, such as bonding and bridging; specific elements of social capital, such as reciprocity, trust, and shared values, identities and purposes; and addresses the broader socio-historical context in which social capital networks are located. The thesis employs a model of agency that encompasses three core fields of agency ??? individual, social and political. These fields of agency encapsulate the capacity for women to ???act??? and exercise choice and change in their own lives, in the community, and in the polity, and to do this through collective action. The thesis applies these ideas using an embedded case study model combining documentary analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal agency and social capital to be in tension. Activities that feed the agential capacity of the organisation and its members are more successfully realised in areas closest to women???s past experiences than in those addressing the public sphere. The research nevertheless shows that a voluntary association such as VIEW can foster women???s agency. Indeed, building women???s capacities in society as a whole may well rely on organisational contexts where women are empowered to self-develop and connect their activities to broader society. This is impacted by the nature, purpose, and social location of the social capital networks of women and others, and has implications for how we understand the ongoing role of voluntary associations in civil society. By revealing how different dimensions of social capital operate and intersect with women???s agency, the thesis shows the dynamic role of voluntary associations in civil society.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Alongside informal networks of friends and family, formal social groupings such as voluntary associations are valued by older people as opportunities for engagement. In Australia, one such grouping is the licensed social (or ‘registered’) club. Approximately 20 per cent of all older Australians, and 80 per cent of older residents of the state of New South Wales, actively participate in such clubs. Despite this, older people’s registered club participation has received little scholarly attention. This ethnographic study of one particular registered club aimed to discover the nature, meaning and role of club participation for its older members. Social capital existing in club-based networks emerged as a further investigative focus, and its mechanisms and outcomes were examined. Participant observation and in-depth interviewing were the main data collection methods used. Data analysis procedures included thematic analysis (based loosely on grounded theory methodology), as well as the more contextsensitive narrative analysis and key-words-in-context analysis. The study found that club participation enabled older members to maintain valued social networks, self-reliance and a sense of autonomy. Social networks were characterised by social capital of the bonding type, being largely homogeneous with respect to age, gender, (working) class and cultural background. Strong cohesive bonds were characterised by intimacy and reciprocity, and possessed norms including equality and the norm of tolerance and inclusiveness. These helped to minimise conflict and build cohesiveness, while protecting older club-goers from increasing marginalisation within the club. Peer grouping within this mainstream setting may have shielded the older club-goers from stigma associated with participation in old-age specific groups. The nature and scale of registered club participation amongst older Australians points to their unique and important role. The findings of this research indicate that – for at least this group of older men and women - club use is a major contributor to maintaining social connectedness and a sense of self as self-reliant, autonomous and capable. In the context of an ageing population, Australia’s registered clubs feature in the mosaic of resources available to older people, and their communities, for the creation of social capital.

Social capital is embedded in relationships and crucial for facilitating value creation. This study adopts a micro-relational perspective on social capital and addresses the gap in the literature concerning its importance for explaining the management of professional-client relationships. The research provides an in-depth analysis of professional-client relationships, considering both the structure and the attributes, as well as how social capital is utilized by professionals to create and maintain networks with new and existing clients. This research proposes a framework for examining the relationship between human capital and social capital. Human capital is understood as manifested by the extent of knowledge acquisition within three domains: market knowledge, technical knowledge and client-specific knowledge. The outcomes of social capital in professional-client relationships are examined in relation to knowledge acquisition and relationship outcome variables. Professionals employed in knowledge-intensive firms rely on both their human capital and social capital to acquire and commercialize their knowledge to deliver value in their professional services to clients. However, research to-date has insufficiently investigated the relationship between human capital and social capital, and the application of social capital theory to the study of lawyers and law firms, as proposed in this PhD research, draws attention to the importance of these social processes within professional-client relationships. Social capital, in this study, is defined as consisting of two dimensions: structural and attributive. The structural dimension of social capital refers to the idea that networks of actors can influence the outcomes of social relationships, while the attributive dimension of social capital refers to the extent of trust in relationships. Structural perspectives on social capital have been predominant in the literature, but discussion on the attributes of such ties have been lacking. As such, with limited attempts to operationalize the construct of social capital in the literature (Koka and Prescott, 2002) and the differing aspects of social capital considered in empirical investigations (Wu, 2008), existing studies on social capital have been characterized by the lack of consensus on the dimensions that compose social capital as well as the measures of social capital (Bolino et al., 2002; Wu, 2008). The theoretical framework is examined through a triangulation of cross-methods and cross-samples approaches by conducting two studies (qualitative and quantitative as different methods) with different samples. Study 1 is a qualitative study, designed to evaluate the theoretical framework through a set of exploratory interviews with Australian client organizations to reveal their views on the contracting, evaluation and continuation of legal service delivery by external law firms. Many of the organizations included in this study are large and diverse businesses, with in-house departments ranging from those managing a small team to large in-house teams working in a large corporate company. Study 1 is an exploratory investigation of the themes that emerged from the interviews, and its findings provide some preliminary evidence for the various propositions. Study 2 is a quantitative study of survey research of Australian law firms and their client organizations conducted by administering web-based questionnaires to lawyers and their clients. The questionnaire items are designed to measure the constructs presented in the theoretical framework, with data collected using both social network techniques and a conventional Likert-type format of question items. The data are analyzed using a series of statistical regression procedures to test for mediation and the effects of the control variables, as well as by conducting Partial Least Squares (PLS)-based structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between the constructs in the full structural model. The findings from Study 2 indicate support for the hypotheses presented in the theoretical framework. First, the findings support the hypothesis that there is a link between human capital and social capital. Knowledge acquired from all clients, representing the aspect of a professional’s human capital in this context, is significant in influencing both dimensions of social capital. Second, the findings of the study denote that human capital, as represented by knowledge acquired from a professional’s most important client, plays a mediating role in the relationships between social capital and the various relationship outcomes of reputation, referrals, fee income, and relationship continuity. Third, the findings reveal that the construct of the structural dimension of social capital is made up of various components, including: centrality, frequency of communication, nature of communication, the non-redundancy of ties, and network diversity. Finally, the findings also indicate a high reliability score for conceptualizing the attributive dimension of social capital as constituting of three types of trust: rational trust, moral trust, and affective trust. In conclusion, the study provides a useful means of advancing our understanding of the link between social capital, human capital (knowledge acquisition), and relationship outcomes by empirically examining these constructs in the context of professional-client relationships, and by creating a new line of research inquiry into this significant area of strategic management research.

<p><p>Drawing on participatory knowledge creation, this thesis examines the diverse ways in which social capital of poor, rural women in Bangladesh serve as a “capacity of individuals to command scarce resources, by virtue of their membership in networks or broader social structures” (Portes 1995:120). It addresses how women’s capacity to command resources, needed for their livelihood and for a dignified life, is influenced by cultural practice, power and gender relations, which interplay within and around their networks. Women are represented as active participants who are shown to celebrate, adapt, sustain, negotiate and resist the circumstances of their lives. Women find space to manoeuvre in the situations they face, strategize in their dealings with various actors, and manipulate resources and constraints.</p></p><p><p>The author argues that the social capital of women and the portfolio of bonding, bridging and linking relations that women have, or do not have, are keys to an understanding of the bargaining processes in their households and communities. Among the research participants, women’s ability to eventually change cultural practice, power- and gender relations depends upon whether women, individually or collectively, have a variety of bonding, bridging and linking relations to strengthen their bargaining power.</p></p>

In this era emphasizing the knowledge economy, corporate survival has been paid special attention following the financial depression. For the corporate under the era of knowledge economy, competitive advantages are from knowledge sharing and organizational innovation. More recently, literature has emerged that offers findings about social capital as a complete concept to explore its influences and functions. In this study, we seek to address the three dimensions, namely relationship, trust, and norms of the internal social capital in the context of Chinese culture and further explore the interactive relationships and influences among them. Using the structure equation model, we use data collected 385 knowledge workers from the high-tech, financial and medical industries of Taiwan. The findings show that (1) relationship has positive influences on norms and trust; (2) the relationship, norms, and trust have positive influences on knowledge sharing; (3) the internal social capital has positive influences on organizational innovation; (4) knowledge sharing has a positive influence on organizational innovation; (5) knowledge sharing has partial mediating effects on social capital and organizational innovation. Furthermore, we proposed a theoretical model of relationship, norms, and trust for future research. These findings could be useful in academic field and practical applications.

For decades, economic theories have been mostly based on rational choices made by selfish individuals to maximize their utility, while sociology spent a lot of efforts describing the environment of individuals and explaining how this environment shapes theirs decisions. However, the last thirty years have seen many sociological concepts appear in the economic literature. For example, behavioral economics introduces things such as envy or altruism in economic theories. Other notions such as social capital, social norms, trust or community became more and more present in economic papers. The objective of this new strand of literature is to engage into sort of socioeconomic approach and to shed some light on interpersonal relationships. This thesis belongs to this socioeconomic approach, and tries to explore new aspects of various concepts. The two first papers are theoretical. In the first one, we explore the negative side of social capital, which has not been studied extensively, by investigating the effect of a norm on consumers when moving is costly. In the second one, we introduce a sociological concept, namely social identity, in a classic economic model in order to show how social interactions modifies its results, and hence, the importance of taking such interpersonal relationships into account. The third and final paper is an empirical case study of social capital in Belgium, an exercise that has not been done before, with the objective of comparing the level of social capital between the various regions of the country. In the first paper, The Tyranny of Social Norms on Individual Behavior, we study the negative effect of the existence of a norm and moving cost inside a community. Because of deviation cost (such as social shame or peer pressure for example), consumers inside a given community may not reach their ideal consumption, that is the consumption they would have without social constraint. On the other hand, moving to another community may be too expensive (in terms of social assets needed to be part of the new community). Hence, agents may get stuck in their community, being forced to consume something they do not want to. One example of such behavior is the underinvestment in education in some neighborhood. We show that such equilibria are possible and that they may be socially suboptimal equilibria as well as Pareto inferior equilibria. We also show that state intervention can correct those “bad” equilibria by operating transfers between agents in order to lower the moving cost. In the second paper, Social Identity, Advertising and Market Competition, we use a particular approach of a sociological concept, namely Social Identity, which focuses on the fact that people want to signal who they are to others. We assume that this is done by choosing a specific consumption (think of fashion market for example). We show that under this assumption, the classical result of Bertrand Price Competition does not hold anymore, and that prices and profits are positive, meaning that social identity creates market power for firms. Moreover, if the number of goods is limited, groups will be formed, and there will be multiple equilibria, each one corresponding to a particular partition of the consumers. We then add the possibility for firms to use advertising. This allows consumers to have a coordination tool, but increases also market powers for firms. We investigate the various equilibria that arise and their impact in term of welfare. In the third paper, Social Capital in Belgium, we construct an index of social capital using the European Social Survey, and we show that this index can be decomposed in three aspects: Trust, Social Activities and Social Network. We then study whether there is a difference in social capital between Belgium’s regions or not. We show that indeed, such difference exists, even when controlling for socioeconomic variables. In a third part, we investigate whether the level of social capital is higher or lower in Belgium than in other European countries, and we analyze European regional differences in term of social capital.

Due to the progressive development of science and technology, globalization has become the main trend in the 21st century and, consequently, teamwork cooperation has been the key for achieving successful enterprise organization. However, the individual background and profession as well as other factors will bring out different emotional attitudes and behaviors; conflict within a team will then arise. How a team can be flexible and efficient at low cost, is the critical focus of its existence. Empiricism is employed to analyze the correlation between team performance and the team¡¦s EI, conflict, as well as social capital expenditure on the part of the organization. The results of questionnaires revealed the following: I.Establishing a positive environment and team evaluation system has a significant influence on team performance when the social capital of an organization is involved. II. Conflict has an interference effect on a team¡¦s EI and performance. (a)Task conflict: when multiple performance management is involved in the conflict there¡¦s a significant moderating effect on team performance. (b)Relationship conflict: when feedback is involved in the conflict there¡¦s an insignificant moderating effect on team performance. III. Team conflict has an interference effect on the EI social capital of an organization. A. Task conflict (a)When multiple performance management is involved in moderating conflict there¡¦s a significant influence on the social capital of an organization. (b)When team evaluation is involved in moderating conflict there¡¦s an insignificant influence on the social capital of an organization B. Relationship conflict (a) Establishing a positive environment involved in moderating relationship conflict has a significant influence on the social capital of an organization. (b) Conducting team evaluation involved in moderating relationship conflict has a significant influence on the social capital of an organization.

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Camps provide an avenue for examining positive youth development. Camps represent environments where children can develop their social capital and emotional intelligence insofar as camp activities teach children how to build positive relationships and to relate to others emotionally that lead to positive outcomes. Little research has examined children’s social capital and emotional intelligence and the relationship between them. Using a longitudinal dataset, this study examined the change of social capital and emotional intelligence experienced by campers. Findings revealed that increases in social capital caused increases in emotional intelligence. Differences were found based on gender. Furthermore, residential camps were found to have a stronger effect on the relationship between social capital and emotional intelligence than day camps. This study lends itself to furthering the understanding of the development of emotional intelligence and the importance of camp in children’s development.

This thesis explores the structure and delivery of education programs to justice-involved adults in Canadian federal prisons and in the community. A series of semi-structured interviews as well as three volumes of the Journal for Prisoners on Prisons were analyzed using a qualitative approach to determine whether or not principles of adult education and components of performative space are present in current correctional education strategies. The findings suggest that while there are occurrences of both elements in the education that is provided to prisoners, the programs in the community are much more reflective of these adult learning standards. This project highlights the need for research into the area of adult correctional education, increased collaboration between the fields of criminology and education, and provides a framework from which future research can continue.