Social Capital and Individual Performance: A Study of Academic Collaboration
📝 Abstract
Studies on social networks highlight the importance of network structure or structural properties of a given network and its impact on performance outcome. One of the important properties of this network structure is referred as “social capital” which is the “network of contacts” and the associated values attached to these networks of contacts. In this study, our aim is to provide empirical evidence of the influence of social capital and performance within the context of academic collaboration. We suggest that the collaborative process involves social capital embedded within relationships and network structures among direct co-authors. Thus, we examine whether scholars’ social capital is associated with their citation-based performance, using co-authorship and citation data. In order to test and validate our proposed hypotheses, we extract publication records from Scopus having “information science” in their title or keywords or abstracts during 2001 and 2010. To overcome the limitations of traditional social network metrics for measuring the influence of scholars’ social capital within their co-authorship network, we extend the traditional social network metrics by proposing a new measure (Power-Diversity Index). We then use Spearman’s correlation rank test to examine the association between scholars’ social capital measures and their citation-based performance. Results suggest that research performance of authors is positively correlated with their social capital measures. This study highlights that the Power-diversity Index, which is introduced as a new hybrid centrality measure, serves as an indicator of power and influence of an individual’s ability to control communication and information.
💡 Analysis
Studies on social networks highlight the importance of network structure or structural properties of a given network and its impact on performance outcome. One of the important properties of this network structure is referred as “social capital” which is the “network of contacts” and the associated values attached to these networks of contacts. In this study, our aim is to provide empirical evidence of the influence of social capital and performance within the context of academic collaboration. We suggest that the collaborative process involves social capital embedded within relationships and network structures among direct co-authors. Thus, we examine whether scholars’ social capital is associated with their citation-based performance, using co-authorship and citation data. In order to test and validate our proposed hypotheses, we extract publication records from Scopus having “information science” in their title or keywords or abstracts during 2001 and 2010. To overcome the limitations of traditional social network metrics for measuring the influence of scholars’ social capital within their co-authorship network, we extend the traditional social network metrics by proposing a new measure (Power-Diversity Index). We then use Spearman’s correlation rank test to examine the association between scholars’ social capital measures and their citation-based performance. Results suggest that research performance of authors is positively correlated with their social capital measures. This study highlights that the Power-diversity Index, which is introduced as a new hybrid centrality measure, serves as an indicator of power and influence of an individual’s ability to control communication and information.
📄 Content
1
(Submitted to JASIST)
Social Capital and Individual Performance: A Study of Academic Collaboration
Abstract
Studies on social networks highlight the importance of network structure or structural properties of a given network and its impact on performance outcome. The empirical validation of the association between network structures and performance has been well documented in a number of recent studies. One of the important properties of this network structure is referred as “social capital” which is the “network of contacts” and the associated values attached to these networks of contacts. There are very few systematic empirical studies suggesting a role of co-authors, as social capital in their scientific collaboration network and their effect on performance. In this study, our aim is to provide empirical evidence of the influence of social capital and performance within the context of academic collaboration. We suggest that the collaborative process involves social capital embedded within relationships and network structures among direct co-authors. Thus, we examine whether scholars’ social capital is associated with their citation-based performance, using co-authorship and citation data. In order to test and validate our proposed hypotheses, we extract publication records from Scopus having “information science” in their title or keywords or abstracts during 2001 and 2010. To overcome the limitations of traditional social network metrics for measuring the influence of scholars’ social capital within their co-authorship network, we extend the traditional social network metrics by proposing a new measure (Power-Diversity Index). We then use Spearman’s correlation rank test to examine the association between scholars’ social capital measures and their citation-based performance. Results suggest that research performance of authors is positively correlated with their social capital measures. This study highlights the importance of scholars’ social capital characteristics on their performance suggesting stronger links to more powerful contacts will lead to better performance and, therefore, their respective professional social network shows indicative outcomes to evaluate and predict the performance of scholars. It further highlights that the Power-diversity Index, which is introduced as a new hybrid centrality measure, serves as an indicator of power and influence of an individual’s ability to control communication and information.
Keywords Social capital, social network analysis, co-authorship analysis, individual performance power-diversity.
- Introduction
Prominent sociologists such as Burt (1992), Coleman (1988) and Granovetter (1973) claim that personal attributes are not only the effective factor leading to the success of actors‟ performance, but the extent of social capital accumulated in their respective networks is more significant (Oh, Choi, & Kim, 2006). Social capital produces benefits or outcomes for individual and collective actors, which is generated through structural sources (Burt, 1992). The core idea of social capital is that a person‟s (or a group of people‟s) associates (e.g., family members, friends, colleagues) form an important asset that can be used to gain optimal performance (Woolcock & Narayan, 2000).
The concept of social capital provides a useful and comprehensive conceptual perspective (Sawyer, Crowston, & Wigand, 1999; Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998) for understanding social capital and value creation
2
within a networking context. Accordingly, social capital means “the set of social resources embedded in relationships” (Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998, p. 464). Social capital has three components: structural, relational, and cognitive (Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998; Wellman, 1988). The structural dimension involves social interaction that the actor uses to gain access, information, or resources. The relational dimension encompasses aspects that arise from the interactions (including trust and loyalty). The cognitive dimension includes attributes such as shared norms, codes of action, and convergence of views. Our research suggests that conceptualizing social capital in terms of network structures, such as articulated by the strength of weak ties theory (Granovetter, 1973, 1983), provides valuable insight into scholars‟ co-authorship activities. In most large organizations, performance of individuals and teams are measured through a set of metrics that pertain to task and contextual performance. Similarly in academia, scholars and scientists are evaluated based on their academic performance (e.g., research productivity, teaching evaluations, governance capabilities, achieved grants). Such evaluation of scholars is not only needed for faculty recruitment and promotion schemes, but also for governmental funding allocation and for achieving a high reputation within the research community. The reputation of research organizations indi
This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.