Position generators, affiliations, and the institutional logics of social capital:

A study of Taiwan firms and individuals

To appear in Ray-May Hsung, Nan Lin, and Ronald L. Breiger (eds.), Contexts of Social Capital: Social Networks in Communities, Markets, and Organizations. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Ray-May Hsung* Ronald L. Breiger**

Abstract

We build on existing theory and research on social capital and position generators in this study of knowledge workers in a vital sector of the Taiwan economy. At the same time, we develop two innovations. First, we find it helpful for certain purposes to recast the study of position-generated networks as a series of studies of two-mode data arrays. This allows us to unify the study of position-generators and the study of social-capital effects of voluntary association membership. It also allows us to identify institutional logics (by which we mean associations between clumps of locations within a firm, positions accessed, and types of relations used in accessing those positions) in this study of position generators and voluntary affiliations of individuals in Taiwan organizations. We employ graphical techniques, correspondence analysis, and generalizations of structural equivalence to understand some of the typical ways that different ranks of people within organizations make distinctive uses of the structures (formal and informal) in which they are embedded, including their access to occupational positions and voluntary associations.. Our second innovation is to distinguish “good social capital” (in the form of a positive effect on income accruing from access to a larger number of high-status positions) from “bad social capital,” which appears in our study as a negative effect on income resulting from the ability to access a larger number of lower-status positions.

*Professor, Department of Sociology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

hsung@nccu.edu.tw

**Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Breiger@Arizona.Edu