Edinburgh Napier University

  ‘Classic’ accounts of social capital have emerged
in accounts of stable networks or institutional
environments. These conditions do not apply in
the case of many firms – a case in point being
small firm networks that rely on rapid turnover of
projects. Our research team is attempting to
identify how social capital is manifest in these
contexts, and thus to make suggestions for
building, maintaining and refreshing such capital.
We present work to date that converts this type of
tacit knowledge into sets of explicit and
manageable local data, and provide examples of
information visualizations for profiling and
retrieval that support the management of social
capital.