Social Capital Processes in Cross Cultural Management

Many researchers in the area of cross cultural management follow a structuralist and static conception of the culture construct. In this article, I outline a critique of this approach to culture and offer the concept of social capital as a potential corrective to the limitations of the structuralist paradigm widely in use. The social capital approach treats social relations, rather than organizations or individuals, as the unit of analysis, and focuses on the processes and mechanisms by which social relations contribute to outcomes relevant to cross cultural management. I suggest a methodology for studying social capital as a network process, focusing on the connections between actions or events.

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