Kaisa Still, Jukka Huhtamäki, Martha G. Russell Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA, 24-25 October 2013

1. Relational Capital and Social
Capital: One or two Fields of
Research?
Kaisa Still, Jukka Huhtamäki, Martha G. Russell
ICICKM 2013, Washington, DC, USA
http://bit.ly/icickm2013src

2. Introductions
Kaisa Still
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
kaisa.still@vtt.fi
Jukka Huhtamäki
Tampere University of Technology
jukka.huhtamaki@tut.fi // @jnkka
Martha G. Russell
mediaX at Stanford University
martha.russell@stanford.edu

3. Why this study?
• Social capital and relational capital are often used in
literature in association with each other or
interchangeably
We found inspiration from Landström‟s (2012) study on
whether innovation and entrepreneurship are one or two
fields of study
Instead of looking at the authorship, we went to
analyze the reference/citation structures between the
authors in the two disciplines
Citation network can be seen as an information
network representing the relatedness of subject manner
(Newman 2010)
•
•
•

5. Method and data
• Scopus data: 2,000 most cited social capital
articles and 144 most cited relational capital
articles
• Authorship analysis done using Scopus‟ in-built
analytics
• Reference network:
1. CSV export from Scopus
2. Author name extraction (Python)
3. Author name curation (Google Refine)
4. Network creation (Python &NetworkX)
5. Network analysis and visualization

6. Author Activity
Most active
authors in
relational and
social capital
literature
Michael A. Hitt

7. Social Capital Reference Network

8. Social capital authorities

9. Example: Social capital literature
“By „social capital,‟ I mean
features of social lifenetworks, norms, and trust–
that enable participants to
act together more effectively
to pursue shared objectives.”
(Putnam, 1995)

10. Relational Capital Reference Network

11. Relational capital authorities

12. Example: Relational capital literature

13. Social Capital & Relational Capital

14. Limitations
• The exact search phrases “social capital”
and “relational capital” were used to collect
the data
Quality of data-driven analysis is a function
of the quality of the data: Scopus data is
limited and e.g. author identification remains
a challenge
•

15. Conclusions
• Citation network analysis does help in
understanding scientific literature and, we
claim, in facilitating the development of a
subject area
Social capital and relational capital are
related but distinct domains; only 4 out of 20
key authorities are shared
The evolution of the two domains should be
analyzed further to reveal the evolution of the
literature and the diffusion of the to concepts
•
•

16. Comments and discussion!

17. Author contact information
Kaisa Still
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
kaisa.still@vtt.fi
Jukka Huhtamäki
Tampere University of Technology
jukka.huhtamaki@tut.fi // @jnkka
MarthaG. Russell
mediaX at Stanford University
martha.russell@stanford.edu