"On social capital and organization change"

Editor's Note:

Of course, we rarely get real letters to the editors any more. As we like to say out here in California, "that's just so 20th century." Ah, but we do get emails, and as a complement to Elisha Krauss's review of John Kotter's new tome, here is an e-letter review by a colleague, Jeff Kelley, of a recent symposium in a journal you may or may not have heard of. Finally, we would add this symposium as a further supplement to the interesting articles we reviewed last issue of The Public Manager on networks by Rob Cross and X teams by Deborah Ancona.

One of the best articles I have seen recently is in the current issue of the Journal for Economics and Management Strategy (JEMS), "Social Capital and Organizational Change in High-Involvement and Traditional Work Organizations," by Gant, Ichniowski, and Shaw. It is one of three articles offered as part of a symposium on organizational change. As the abstract states:

We present new evidence indicating that changing from a traditional human resource management (HRM) environment to an innovative one entails a change not only in formal work practices, but also in the informal networks and patterns of interaction among employees. We focus on the differences in the social capital of these workplaces and measure differences in the structure of interactions and information transfer among employees across a sample of manufacturing lines with a common production technology and different HRM systems. We then consider the implications of these differences and show that change from one form of workplace practices to the other is therefore not just a matter of paying for the direct costs of a new set of HRM practices. Rather, it would involve a disruptive overhaul in the entire network of interactions among all workers at the plant.

The authors (Gant, Ichniowski, and Shaw) distinguish between "involvement-oriented" (IO) and "control-oriented" (CO) organizations in conducting their research and in developing their model of HRM adoption and the role of social capital, particularly in the context of problem solving. Given what I see in our (own research) learning value analysis data set, both in the aggregate and for specific organizations, this research is relevant to service sector practices as forms of production processes.

Their view regarding the number of "ties" (communication links) among workers (actors) as degree centrality seems particularly relevant, given the informal learning and knowledge networks that we know live in work practices. The authors present visual representations of the patterns resulting from these interactions, with the density of intergroup interactions a key indicator. This research enables nuanced understanding of HRM systems as investments in problem-solving capital, with direct implications for organizational change.

There is rich food for thought here, and I believe additional validation for the value of bottom-up, practice-based methods for transforming HRM environments. The article draws attention to dynamics that merit additional focus in conducting, validating, and valuing such projects. Finally, I found Susan Helper's introduction to the symposium encouraging in citing four benefits of field research:

* Researchers can ask people directly about their objectives and constraints.

* Fieldwork allows exploration of areas with little preexisting data or theory.

* Fieldwork facilitates use of the right data.

* Fieldwork provides vivid images that promote intuition.

She concludes by stating "As these papers show, field research can be a useful tool for economists." Wow! Economics goes organic. Who'da thunk it?

Jeff Kelley is a consultant and managing principal of CapitalWorks, based in Willamstown, MA.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Bureaucrat, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning