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One potential benefit of collaboration is increased social capital, defined as trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks. Social capital may improve a group's ability to collaborate, manage risk, innovate, and adapt to change. We used mail surveys of group participants and key informant interviews to assess whether social capital changed over time in eight collaborative groups in northwest Colorado. The majority of social capital measures increased over time in all groups. However, social capital between agencies and group members increased more than social capital among other participants for most groups. Interviews revealed that commitment and continuity; understanding, empathy, and respect; transparency; and dependability and predictability are important mechanisms for building social capital in collaborative settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is social capital generated and sustained? In Putnam's micro-oriented socialization perspective, the main source is face-to-face interaction between members of voluntary organizations. This has so far met little empirical support. Consequently, macro-oriented scholars have concluded that organizations are unimportant to social capital formation. We argue that voluntary organizations do play a pivotal role, not as socialization agents, but as institutions within which social capital is embedded. Using European Social Survey data, we analyse the antecedents of social capital both at the individual and regional level. We find that members are more trusting than non-members, but active members are no more trusting than passive members. Furthermore, regional effects are much stronger than individual effects. Regions with high social capital are characterized by broad participation patterns and visible, politically active organizations. Based on these findings, we put forward an alternative institutional account of how organizations create and sustain social capital. Strong and visible voluntary organizations demonstrate the utility and rationality of collective action and provide individuals with a democratic infrastructure, which can be activated when needed. We support this by showing that a positive perception of the democratic value of organizations is strongly related to trust, while personal, time-intensive involvement has no explanatory power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we build a conceptual framework that models the influence of social capital as a multidimensional concept on strategic resource acquisition through interorganizational networks. Inter- organizational networks are considered as effective when they allow for the acquisition of strategic resources. Our conceptual framework reflects that network effectiveness is dependent on the structural and the relational dimension of social capital. The main focus is on how the relational dimension of social capital - in this article conceptualized as trust - in interorganizational networks can directly and indirectly influence the acquisition of strategic resources through those networks. Based on the network literature, social capital literature and the literature on trust, we seek to develop propositions that detail the relationships among trust, interorganizational network characteristics, strategic resource acquisition/network effectiveness and performance. Basically, we argue 1) that different types of trust will have a different impact on network effectiveness, 2) that the level of trust will influence network effectiveness, and 3) that the inter- action between trust and other variables, such as structural dimension variables, are fundamental for analyzing network effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]