Later this month at Communities & Technologies 2009, findings on Beehive and social capital will be presented. I did this research with Chip Steinfield, Nicole Ellison, and Cliff Lampe, colleagues at Michigan State. Chip, Nicole and Cliff have done tons of research on Facebook, found in their interesting set of papers.

The four pictures shown here are from Beehive and show IBM employees all around the world going bowling. There are so many pictures just like this shared on Beehive, highlighting coworkers informally socializing and having fun together. In terms of social capital, we hypothesized that this type of informal sharing and communicating on Beehive could be associated with closer bonds with coworkers and increased access to distant colleagues.

By adapting the survey instrument Chip, Nicole and Cliff use for measuring Facebook intensity and social capital to the IBM & Beehive context, we found that even with limited use of Beehive, over a relatively short amount of time, there are associations between types of usage and different types of social capital:

  • When someone is using Beehive for meeting new contacts, they report a greater interest in making these types of contacts at the company in general.
  • When someone is using Beehive for keeping up with known colleagues, both in their workgroup and in their extended network of loose ties, they report having closer ties with their immediate network (bonding social capital), a higher sense of citizenship (willingness to help the greater good of the company), and greater access to both new people and expertise within the company.
  • And finally, the more intensely someone uses Beehive (meaning more frequent visits and stronger associations with the community on the site) the higher they report their social capital is, across all measures. They have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise.

The paper is Bowling Online: Social Networking and Social Capital Within the Organization and the official abstract is below:

Social capital facilitates knowledge management in organizations by enabling individuals to locate useful information, draw on resources and make contributions to the community. This paper explores the relationship between social capital and use of an internal social network site in a multinational organization. We hypothesize that SNS use contributes to social capital within the organization by enabling users to form networks of heterogeneous contacts and maintain and deepen existing relationships. Survey findings show that bonding relationships, sense of corporate citizenship, interest in connecting globally, and access to new people and expertise are all associated with greater intensity of SNS use.

The full conference program includes a lot of interesting papers.