An Empirical Analysis of an Organizational Continuum in a Japanese Accounting Cloud Service

Social Network

Granovetter (1983) indicated the strength of weak ties in interpersonal ties. Coleman (1988) defined social capital by its function that has a variety of entities with two elements in common: one is that they all consist of some aspect of social structure, and another is that they facilitate certain actions of actors -whether persons or corporate actors- within the structure. There are two arguments of network structures that create social capital: closure of social networks, and structural holes of social networks. Closure of social networks as social structure facilitates social capital (Coleman, 1988). Structural holes are an opportunity to broker the flow of information between people, and control the projects that bring together people from opposite sides of the hole (Burt, 2000). Burt (2001) discussed that structural holes and network closure can be brought together in a productive way. Burt (2001) concluded, “while brokerage across structural holes is the source of added value, closure can be critical to realizing the value buried in the structural holes”. Kim and Aldrich (2005) mentioned that entrepreneurs can apparently reap substantial returns on their social capital and boost their chances of commercial success. They offered a simple scenario in Figure 1 that entrepreneurs can reach out within two steps to one million potential resource providers by leveraging their direct ties.

Figure 1.

The potential of indirect ties (Source: Kim and Aldrich, 2005 p. 59)