Conaldi, Guido ORCID: 0000-0003-3552-7307 (2007) Social capital key players: A measure for relevant actors in processes of local development. In: 4th Conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis (ASNA 2007), 13-15 September 2007, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The role of social capital in processes of socioeconomic development has been studied extensively for more than a decade. Influential authors (Dasgupta and Sergaldin 2000; Narayan and Cassidy 2001; Woolcock 1998) in the field of development studies proposed a broad theoretical framework linking social capital and socioeconomic development. At the same time, major international organisations tried to turn this concept into a tool to work out development policies. Particularly, a group ofWorld Bank’s researcher (Bebbington et al. 2006) has produced a body of empirical studies that tackled the questions of how to measure social capital in developing contexts and how to evaluate development policies relying on this concept.
The paper discusses the methodological difficulties of the measurement of social capital in adherence with the World Bank’s model (Fine 2001; Harper 2002) and affirms that social capital needs to be more narrowly defined and its explicative power in socioeconomic processes has to be reduced. To this purpose the studies on social capital carried out in the field of social network analysis represent the most promising starting point (Borgatti et al. 1998; Lin 2001; Lin et al. 2001). Therefore, firstly the paper defines social capital as a relational variable measurable in informational social networks. Secondly the concept of social capital key player is introduced and operationalised applying Borgatti’s KPP-POS measures (Borgatti 2006).
Social capital key players are sets of actors that can maximally contribute to the diffusion of information and innovation in their social network, therefore potentially contributing more to endogenous processes of development (Chiesi 2007; Trigilia 2001). For this reason their individuation can substantially help the correct framing of local development policies that rely on the active participation of the affected comunities.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	social capital, local development, social network analysis, key player measures
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) > Centre for Business Network Analysis (CBNA) Faculty of Business > Department of International Business & Economics
Related URLs:	Publisher Publisher Organisation
Last Modified:	04 Mar 2019 16:48
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/5338

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