1. Social capital and social network
Knowledge management
Social capital and social network

2. Complementary views on knowledge sharing
Knowledge “market”
Cost and benefit analysis (social, economic, political…)
Reward system
Social capital/organizational culture
Society can’t be reduced to mere market transactions
Norms, culture, identity, and social relations

3. Social capital
“features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1993).”

4. Conditions for knowledge sharing
Huysman, M. (2004). Design requirements for knowledge-sharing tools: a need for
social capital analysis

5. Out of nothing, creation and innovation

6. Collective knowledge
The accumulated knowledge of the organization stored in its rules, procedures, routines and shared norms which guide the problem-solving activities and patterns of interaction among its members.
Scientists debate how important this number is, though. Previous research on animal brains has indicated that bigger isn't necessarily better; the bulkier brains, holding lots of neurons, could just be what's needed to control larger bodies. Others contend that our big brains are necessary for our complex social lives, our extreme tool use or our ability to think about thinking, called metacognition.
Other researchers believe that our intelligence lies not in our brain size, but in the complexity of the brain's interactions. The brain is so complex and tangled in and around itself, in fact, that unraveling how it workshas been a seemingly never-ending puzzle.
All in all, is a monkey's brain worth of neurons off the top really make all that big of a difference?

7. Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Samuel Johnson

8. Seeking Knowledge / advice
顏色：顏色越深年級越高（黑 ─ 博士班、墨綠 ─ 碩士班、深綠 ─ 大四、綠 ─ 大三、淺綠 ─ 大二、白 ─ 大一）
形狀：方形─圖資系、圓形─非圖資系
大小：betweenness centrality

9. Discuss Class Materials
顏色：顏色越深年級越高（黑 ─ 博士班、墨綠 ─ 碩士班、深綠 ─ 大四、綠 ─ 大三、淺綠 ─ 大二、白 ─ 大一）
形狀：方形─圖資系、圓形─非圖資系
大小：betweenness centrality

10. Social network analysis
“the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organization, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities”

11. Network and information flow
“The well-structure network can act as a screening device in the face of information overload, include others who can be bought into an opportunity, and deliver information early, providing the opportunity to act on the information before it is widespread or obsolete.”

12. Social distance trumps physical distance

13. 6 degree on the Facebook
The difference between Facebook and the Milgram’s experiment?

14. Modeling of the small world phenomenon
Regular graph, people only talk to a set of people closest to them and no one else;
CAVEMEN
Furthermore, each individual talks to same number of people, no one is particularly popular or more well-connected
Random graph, people are free to talk or associate with anyone in the network without the restrictions of his/her backgrounds, affiliation or upbringing, the link can be formed to anywhere, like we are free from cultural, institutional, or geographic constrains
Short cut and jump
Stared from a circle of nodes, where each node is connected to its immediate and next-nearest neighbors.
To make this world a small one, a few extra links were added, connecting randomly selected nodes.
These long-range links offer the crucial shortcuts between distant nodes, drastically shortening the average separation between all nodes.

15. The strength of weak tie
Mark Granovetter’s (1973) classic article on finding a job argued that weak-tie relations (casual, indirect) give actors better access to new information and opportunities. But, strong ties (emotionally intense, frequent, direct) restrict the flow of new information from diverse, distant sources.

16. Strength of a tie and influence
M. S. Granovetter: The Strength of Weak Ties, AJS, 1973:
finding a job through a contact that one saw
frequently (2+ times/week) 16.7%
occasionally (more than once a year but < 2x week) 55.6%
rarely 27.8%
but… length of path is short
contact directly works for/is the employer
or is connected directly to employer
Physical contact,
In the era of virtual connection?

17. The Strength of Weak Ties
Granovetter observed that the presence of weak ties often reduced path lengths (distance) between any two individuals—which led to quicker diffusion of information.

18. Granovetter’s theory of weak tie
Strong ties are embedded in high homophilous clusters
Weak ties connect to diversity
Weak ties a source of novel information
Adopted from Borgatti, 2004

19. Granovetter’s theory of
Strong ties results in triad closure
Ties that are part of closed triples cannot be bridges or local bridges
Therefore, only weak ties can be bridges

20. Bridge Why bridges tend to be weak ties?
An edge that joins two nodes n1 and n2 in a graph is called a bridge if deleting
The edge would cause n1 and n2 in two different components.
Why bridges tend to be weak ties?

21. Intuitively
Supposed A – B is a strong tie, they are likely to have many acquaintances (weak ties) in common, which prevents it to become a bridge

23. Two kinds of capital “Robert has more social capital”, is it true?
“Bonding capital” and “Bridging capital”

24. Closure vs. Structural Holes*
07/16/96
Closure vs. Structural Holes
James Coleman: High trust in a community with full closure networks (“strong component”) and strong ties fosters mutual assistance obligations and the social control of deviant behaviors (e.g., disciplining children who misbehave in public)
Ronald Burt: Ego gains numerous competitive advantages and higher investment returns if ego’s weak, direct-tie relations span structural holes, thus serving as bridge between its alters *

25. Embedding and trust Should Jessica trust Robert?
Play nice? Prison’s dilemma
Social liabilities The “dark side” of social capital: constraints or obligations that hinder actions and goal attainment
Intimates (kin, close friends) share same knowledge, norms, beliefs
Although strong ties offer beneficial social support (“haven in a heartless world”), they also result in impacted information & coercive conformity to the social circle’s expectations (folkish society)
Weak relations (acquaintances, coworkers) serve as bridges to other social groupings having information & resources unavailable within one’s intimate social circle; provide opportunities of individual autonomy via unique structural location [Simmelian cross-cutting]

26. Structural advantages
1. Wide diversity
Less redundant information
2. Early access
Seeing opportunities for innovation
3. Control over diffusion
Fish-scale,
What’s is well known here is little known over there
Access to diverse skill sets
Private information
Power

27. Amplifier for creativity
“Experience from many domains suggest that innovations often arise from the unexpected synthesis of multiple ideas, each of them on their own perhaps well-known, but well-known in distinct and unrelated bodies of expertise.”
Accidental discoveries
Taste, asthma, lung
A propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated
The “sagacity” of being able to link together apparently innocuous information to come to a valuable conclusion

28. Brokerage

29. Boundary spanners

30. Connecting heterogeneous knowledge
Boundary spanners – who take care of one specific boundary example
Outposts – bringing back news from the front and exploring new territories

31. Structural holes
“given greater homogeneity within than between groups, people whose networks bridge the structural holes between groups have earlier access to a broader diversity of information and have experience in translating information across groups . P.354”

32. Structural holes
if you link to two people who are not linked you can control their communication
Three actor network with
a structural hole

33. Structural Holes from Ego’s Viewpoint*
07/16/96
Structural Holes from Ego’s Viewpoint
A typical office-politics situation:
Ego fills a structural hole between B and both A’s, extracts commission
Ego can’t fill any hole between A’s
Indeed, maintaining ties to both A’s is redundant (and costly)
If Ego cuts a tie to one A, where should it invest time & energy forging a new tie that will maximize its entrepreneurial opportunities?
To gain information and control benefits from structural holes, players must identify bridging / brokering opportunities and fill in those gaps
SOURCE: Knoke (2001:237) *

34. Suppose you have a budget of five connections (before facebook)
Look at the “before” chart.
How many redundant relationship?
One? (the connection between 3 and 5)
What if 1,2,3 are from engineering; 4, 5 are from finance
The redundancy becomes 2

35. Network “redundancy”

36. In a new person provides information that you already have, the new person adds coordination but no value

37. Network constraints
Constraints: the extent to which an actor’s connections to other are also connected to one another
E.g. A is constrained by its relationship with B to the extent that A does not have many alternatives (has few other ties except that to B), and A’s other alternatives are also tied to B.
Cluster coefficient

38. Echoing Coleman, Burt argues that social closure provides a key resource for building trust and amplifying reputation
© 2004 Ronald Burt. Brokerage and Closure, Cambridge University Press 2005.

41. Strong ties, weak ties
Strong ties represent willingness to share information, but those to whom we are weakly tied may have access to more valuable and diverse information due to their connections in different networks

42. The case for strong ties
de Montjoye, Y. A., Stopczynski, A., Shmueli, E., Pentland, A., & Lehmann, S. (2014). The strength of the strongest ties in collaborative problem solving.Scientific reports, 4.

44. Tie strength and knowledge sharing

45. Network obstacles to innovation
Fragmentation
Collaboration often breaks down across functional lines, technical capabilities, and occupational subcultures in ways that invisibly undermine strategic innovation efforts.
Domination
The voices of a few central network members, who often have expertise good for times gone by, can drown out novel ideas and drive innovation efforts along traditional trajectories long after the market has veered in another direction.
Insularity
The inability to recognize and leverage relevant external expertise can yield excessive cost structures and delays that results in missed market opportunities.
ignorant of or uninterested in cultures, ideas, or peoples outside one's own experience.

46. Information broker
“A player with a network rich in information benefits has contacts: (a) established in places where useful bits of information are likely to air, and (b) providing a reliable flow of information to and from these places.” (Burt, 1992).

47. Centrality Network view of “power”
Manifest itself in social relationship
An ego’s power is alter’s dependence
Centrality analysis identifies individuals having a favored position, having more opportunities and fewer constraints, and presumably possess more power
POWER AND DEPENDECNE (e.g. CORE/PERIPHERY ) structure
Your supervisor might not be able to hurt you directly,
s/he is likely to be able to hurt you by presenting you in a negative light to persons who has the say in your promotion/punishment
The “retired professors“ controversy
To utilized their connection to get more grants money

48. Centrality Degree centrality Closeness centrality
Counting the number of paths of length 1 emanating from a node
Closeness centrality
The total geodesic distance from a given node to all other nodes
Betweenness centrality
The extent that that node falls on the geodesic paths between other pairs of nodes
Eigenvector centrality
assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to high-scoring nodes contribute more to the score of the node in question than equal connections to low-scoring nodes.
Radial measure (degree, closeness) assess walks that emanate from or terminate with a given node
Eigenvector centrality
The measures of centrality discussed thus far are useful but they are based strictly on the number and nature of the ties that each node has with other actors. They treat each tie equally regardless of the identity of the nodes in question.
An alternative approach to the measurement of centrality requires us to weigh ties in terms of the centrality of the nodes involved.
In other words, a tie to a highly central actor should count more than a tie to a less central one.

49. Actor degree centrality
Naïve but not entirely useless.

50. Actor closeness centrality

51. Actor betweenness centrality
The mediation function is hurt by the dense
connection in its surrounding

52. Actor eigenvector centrality
Their neighbors make a huge difference
The node on the right might have high closeness and betweenness measure, and has equal degree centrality with the node on the left.
But it has smaller eigenvector centrality