Premium
RESEARCH ON STRUCTURAL HOLES: AN ASSESSMENT ON MEASUREMENT ISSUES
Author(s) -
Saglietto Laurence,
Cézanne Cécile,
David Delphine
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of economic surveys
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.657
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1467-6419
pISSN - 0950-0804
DOI - 10.1111/joes.12371
Subject(s) - operationalization , structural holes , typology , simple (philosophy) , management science , computer science , network structure , work (physics) , data science , social capital , economics , sociology , epistemology , theoretical computer science , engineering , social science , mechanical engineering , philosophy , anthropology
Social capital theory generally analyses network structures by focusing on the connections between players. However, it has been suggested by several authors that the absence of relations in a network or ‘structural holes’ is meaningful. The aim of our paper is to provide a global survey and appraisal of the academic research on structural holes and discuss its main measurements. We adopt a bibliometric approach and identify a typology of practices, developments, and issues related to structural holes. We highlight a strand of work on operationalization of structural holes, and discuss the various measures they propose. We provide numerical examples emphasizing the respective advantages and limitations of the studied measures. Based on our results, we propose a guide to using existing measures of structural holes according to the type (simple or complex) of network.