Organizational Standing as Corporate Social Capital

Abstract

Organizations in social service delivery networks interact in order to provide many services to a wide variety of client populations. In the course of these interactions, staff and directors of these agencies form assessments of the utility of working with other agencies. These assessments, as social network information, can be used to operationalize a measure of network generated corporate social capital. Organizations well regarded by other organizations have higher social capital. Further, organizations well regarded by well regarded other organizations have higher social capital. Input-output methods are used to generate measures of standing. These assessments are also disaggregated by sector in a way that permits a comparison of the relative contributions to social capital by sector. Data from the SSDURC project are used to illustrate these methods.