Social capital and political bias in knowledge sharing: An exploratory study

A. Willem () and H. Scarbrough
Additional contact information
H. Scarbrough: -

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: The benefits of social capital for the sharing of knowledge are frequently emphasized in the literature (Burt, 1997; Kostava & Roth, 2003; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Tsai, 2000). However, a few authors have also begun to draw our attention towards the drawbacks of social capital for the working of organizations (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Edelman, Bresnen, Newell, & Scarbrough, 2004). In particular, instrumental social capital –as opposed to consummatory social capital- is seen as linked to power relations, which can inhibit the sharing of knowledge (Burt, 1997; Kale et al., 2000). To contribute to this debate on the role of social capital, we carried out a qualitative study in two Belgian companies. Our findings reveal that social capital tends to enhance the sharing of knowledge but that instrumental social capital in particular reflects opportunistic and political objectives, which causes a selective form of knowledge sharing.

Keywords: case studies; informal networking; knowledge sharing; politicking; social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2005-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-net and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_05_355.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:05/355

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().