Resumen de Reframing stakeholder theory from social capital perspective: the glue of cooperation in stakeholder networks
The aim of this dissertation is to present a new stakeholder theory based on the concept of social capital. Social capital has become increasingly popular in a wide range os organizational studies (Nahapiet and Ghosal, 1998; Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998; Leana and Van Buren, 1999; Dess and Shaw, 2001; Krackhardt and Hanson, 1993; Koka and Prescott, 2003; Ahuja, 2000). Despite of abundant research, to the very best of our knowledge, stakeholder theroy based on the concept of social capital has never been developed and neither have its main dimensions nor its benefits explicated. So we define Stakeholder Social Capital (SSC) as a quality of the relationship established between the firm and its stakeholders, and as symbolic exchange based on reciprocity, suitable to connect structurally stakeholders, which generates relational goods to both the firm and its stakeholders. This concept is presented from the Relational Theory (Donati, 1991;2006) wich overcomes the main problems and limitaions of the existing paradigms of social capital, the called instrumental-individualist paradigm (Burt, 1997;1992) and the holistic-communitarian paradigm (Putman, 1993; Futkuyama, 1995). The thesis is structured in four essays on which present the normative, the descriptive and theinstrumental perspective (Donaldson and Preston, 1995) of the theory of stakeholder social capital and where the unit of analysis in the network of firm-stakeholder relationships. On the descriptive os sakeholder social we present a business case based on the grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin, 1990), Natural Gas, and on the instrumental perspective, based on structural equations modeling, we present a significant relationship between stakeholder social capital and competitive advantage in the firm-stakeholder network in the context of a company, Diseñ Textil, and its 294 suppliers.
