I dunno, dan, about this 'book description' (by the publisher - this is on the book, right?) :
Social capital, the advantage created by location in social structure (?) is a critical(bleh) element (bleh) in business strategy. Who has it, how it works and how to develop it have become key questions as markets, organizations and careers become more and more dependent on informal discretionary relationships. The formal organization deals with accountability; Everything else flows through the informal; advice, coordination, cooperation, friendship, gossip, knowledge, trust. Informal relations have always been with us, they have always mattered. What is new is the range of activities in which informal relations now matter, and the emerging clarity we have about how they create advantage for certain people at the expense of others. This is done by brokerage and closure.
Ronald S. Burt builds on his celebrated work in this area to explore the nature of brokerage and closure. Brokerage is the activity of people who live at the intersecting of social worlds, who have a vision advantage of seeing and developing good ideas, an advantage which can be seen in their compensation, recognition and the responsibility they're entrusted with in comparison to their peers. Closure is the tightening of coordination on a closed network of people, and people who do this do well as a complement to brokers because of the trust and alignment they create. Brokerage and Closure explores how these elements work together to define social capital, showing how in the business world reputation has come to replace authority, pursued opportunity (has come to replace) assignment, and reward has come to be associated with achieving competitive advantage in a social order of continuous disequilibrium (that's along object-phrase).
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why is this so poorly written? isn't it poorly written? (I underlined some of what bothers me.)
and Brokerage and Closure are probably interesting, but not as here defined. "the activity of people who live at the intersecting of social worlds, who have.."
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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1 comment:
right about the bolding, although do know that I was not carefully considering what was essential, just spontaneously emphasizing some bits to stand out from a long quotation, I seem to find that helpful on blogs - theoretically for my reading the post later, but anyways for reading-as-I-type-it ~ in the mind organization, not to say mental 'processing' bcs I don't like that word, at least at this moment.
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