Mobilizing Social Capital

Much of the research on mobilizing social capital focuses on the idea that potential resources accessiblethrough existing relationships are converted into actual resources, such as a productive collaboration oruseful advice. Less well understood is how this mobilization process occurs, in part because it is difficult to tease apart potential versus actual resources inherent in existing ties that are active and ongoing. Toovercome this obstacle, we explore the mobilization process in the situation of dormant ties (i.e.,people you used to know) that are reconnected, thereby allowing us to see more clearly how a tie’spotential value can be mobilized and turned into actual value. To do so, we conducted researchcombining an inductive, qualitative field study of reconnections in the North Italian textile district(Study 1) and, to validate our findings, a vignette-based experiment with U.S. workers (Study 2). We findthat the mobilization process can and does fail, sometimes dramatically, when people do not refreshthe tie and thereby do not know where they stand with each other. More specifically, we find that three elements—remembering, catching up, and perceiving the tie similarly—are key in successfullymobilizing social capital.