Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Department of Information Science, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran
2 Department of Information science, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran
3 Librarian
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Considering the importance of social capital, much effort has been made to quantify and measure social capital in organizations such as research and academic institutions and services (Nasr Esfahani, Ansari, Shamei and Agha Hosseini, 2011, p. 110). One of the methods for measuring social capital in research and service organizations is the analysis of the network of scientific cooperation and the study of the degree of coherence of the scientific cooperation network (Abbasi, Vigand and Hossein, 2014). In this regard, there are also two perspectives on social networking that describe the sources of social capital in the social structure. Coleman's theory (1988) has proved that social capital is essentially a result of cohesion that facilitates trust and cooperation among individuals. Another theory was raised by Barrett (1992) and created the creation of social capital through betweenness opportunities created by different nodes.
The institution of public libraries of the country as a research and service organization and because of its relationship with the community and human factors can be_ with more social capital _more successfully go along with its missions in the society, and the social capital existing in the organization results in coherence and the coherence of the people inside the organization and facilitate the achievement of the goals of the organization; And since the determination of the amount of social capital of the public libraries of the country has not been accomplished through scientific cooperation within the organization, the present study examines the amount of social capital through the analysis of the network of scientific cooperation in the institution of public libraries of the country as an institution Research - Services.
Methodology: The current research is applied and descriptive-exploratory. Using a social network analysis approach, the relationship between writers and institutions was studied in the form of scientific collaboration in the staff of the public libraries institution. In the analysis of the way employees collaborated, central social indicators were used according to the social network analysis approach. Centrality is a concept used for analyzing networks and has different types that are used based on the definition of the problem and the purpose of the research. But in general, centralization is used to identify and identify the most important actors in the network. The research population includes all the staff of the institution of libraries in the country that has scientific output and has been published in scientific publications or conferences and has been registered at the Research and Training Office of the Public Libraries of the country as their scientific record. The information in the form of a list of 1,460 scientific outputs from the Public Library Public Library Office of the country was received in Excel format, which was reduced to 1352 after clearing and removing duplicates. To analyze the data, the UCnet software and its complementary package, namely NetDraw, were used for the preparation of co-authorship matrices using Rawormatrix and Excel software.
Findings: The findings of the research showed that the network coherence of the authorship of the staff of the Iranian public libraries is 0.01 which represents the maximum scientific communication among 1% of the staff of this organization. Also, according to the network analysis, in relation to each of the indicators of centrality of degree, betweenness and the closeness, the role of the staff of the institution of public libraries are only 35%, 20% and 25%, respectively.
The results showed that the social capital resulting from the scientific collaboration within the organization is small because, given the low density of the network, which is equal to 0.01, the network has a low degree of cohesion and, therefore, relying on Coleman's theory that social capital essentially results from coherence, which facilitates trust and cooperation among individuals, it can be argued that social capital resulting from scientific cooperation in this organization is small. And with the results of Li et al (2013) and Costa (2014) is aligned. The most central and most contributing authors are Riahi, Pazoki, Sohbatiha, OJaghi, Saberi and Latifi, who have the highest degree of co-authorship. Highly central nodes, as they play an important role in conveying content and attracting new people to the network, are considered as social capital whose elimination reduces the structure of the social network and reduces its coherence (Erfanmanesh and Arshadi, 1394). Accordingly, it should be noted that the amount of social capital formed and the result of scientific cooperation among the 35% of the central and influential employees can be claimed to have been derived from the calculation of the degree centrality.
Also, according to Barrett's (1992) theory of the formation of social capital from the betweenness opportunities created by different nodes, betweenness centrality is used as another indicator in determining the degree of cohesion and as a result of social capital and according to the results of the research, it can be concluded that the amount of social capital formed from this opportunity is the result of the activity of 20% of employees who have played a betweenness role.
Discussion: In the context of the reasons for the limited scientific collaboration, the staff of the public libraries office, according to the results, should be said that most of the collaboration of the institution is the result of scientific cooperation with individuals outside the organization, especially the universities of their time of studying. As in the analysis of inter-organizational cooperation, the results also showed that the most scientific collaboration has been between the public libraries of Iran and the University of Isfahan. In justifying this, it can also be said that the experience of scientific cooperation in the period of study and the recognition and trust formed in the network of cooperation since that time has led to the subsequent publication of the same people. The research findings of Rahimi and Fattahi (2010) also showed that environmental, individual and process-based deterrence factors are effective in reducing the amount of scientific collaboration within the organization (Rahimi & Fatahi, 2010).
Deterrent structural factors such as misunderstandings about the way of cooperation, and environmental deterrents such as lack of cooperative spirit in the organization, lack of funding of the budget, the climate of discrimination and lack of incentives, inhibitors such as reputational factors, differences in knowledge and experience and distrust and so on. In fact, mutual trust between individuals has been recognized as one of the most important factors affecting the level of scientific cooperation (same, 2010).
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