Social Capital and the Creation of Knowledge

This paper examines the relationship between the social capital and knowledge creation in research, mostly in the context of universities. The analysis is developed considering all of the following critical aspects of social capital: direct ties, strengths of direct ties, density, structural holes, centrality, and external-internal index in terms of fields of knowledge. Two important results arise from this research. First, the overall results suggest that, when controlling for other network variables and individual heterogeneity, the effects of the structural holes variable disappear. This result stands in contrast to the established idea that structural holes is the most important variable to represent social capital and, therefore, is seen as contributing to superior performance. Second, the results show that with this strong set of controls, what matters in social capital is having many direct ties, being in a central position, having partners from different areas of knowledge, and being part of a non dense network.