CRA Inc

31 Dec 03 @ 2:54 pm

Conserving Social Capital

Managing relationships — or investing in social capital — takes time and energy. In Conserving Social Capital, David Hornik looks at such social capital as a limited resource that can be “spent” (and thus used up):

The more I think about social networking products that are intended to expand and strengthen social connections in the name of business opportunity the more I think that they misunderstand the fundamental nature of social capital. Social capital is just that, ‘capital.’ If you aren’t careful you can spend it all up.

[…]

If you have a good conversation with a potentially helpful business contact at a conference, he will probably take your call or read your email the first time you reconnect with him. But that relationship is pretty fragile and if your initial post-conference contact with him isn’t at least mutually beneficial, that relationship will be spent before the second email. Even relatively strong relationships can be taxed if they are over-exercised.

The capital metaphor has its limits though. In some ways, a bandwidth metaphor makes more sense; you can only keep so many relationships going (and going strong) at once:

We can only maintain a relatively small number of strong contacts and a somewhat larger number of weak contacts. Relationships are maintained through interaction — we call, email, have lunch, etc. Such intense relationship take time and energy — perhaps we can keep up with a few dozen people that closely, but certainly not hundreds. Moreover, given the sustained nature of close ties, any attempt to increase the circle of strong contacts will either weaken all of the strong relationships or marginalize some relationship that would otherwise have remained close. Similarly, attempts to increase one’s circle of loose relationships will either weaken all those relationships to the point of having little value or replace old relationships with new ones.

This view calls to mind The Magic Number 150 (popularized by Gladwell’s The Tipping Point):

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
— Robin Dunbar

posted in category(s): Points of Interest