| dc.description.abstract | Studies on the insertion of economic relations in social relations in terms of social networks, guided
by the concept of embeddedness, cover researches on the relationship between structured patterns
of interpersonal and interorganizational behavior and the performance of industrial environments.
These patterns, according to the concept of social capital, allow us to understand sociability as a
support to the ability to seek benefits through association in networks. The purpose of this research
is to examine, in a case study, how local interaction processes define network patterns at the levels
of individuals and companies, both within and between levels, and consequently how these
processes affect the creation of social capital via the emergence of network structures. The main
research hypothesis is that the interdependence between social networks at two levels, which
results from their embeddedness, impacts the structuration of similar patterns of behavior at each
of the two levels. In this case study of the BH-TEC Technological Park, interpersonal relations of
advice among directors and interorganizational relations of cooperation between firms were
investigated. Probabilistic multilevel exponential random graphs models are employed to estimate
the effects of local processes of network formation. Such probabilistic models for social network
analysis are appropriate for the test of hypotheses about the structuration of networks that result
from nonrandom social process. The main finding is the identification of significant co-occurrence
of tie creation processes at the individual and the corporate levels; it is nevertheless worthy to
notice that specific processes take place at each level. Specifically, dense cyclical relationships
tend to guide the formation of networks among directors, while dense hierarchical relationships
tend to guide the formation of networks among firms. In terms of social capital, dense networks
among firms reduce uncertainty and foster interorganizational cooperation. For the directors,
according to the analysis, network density is potentially more beneficial for it tends to be associated
with structural autonomy, that is, the agents create and maintain ties with nodes external to their
groups, which is crucial to obtain new information and opportunities for themselves and their
groups, and thus increase the performance of the group. The overall conclusion is the presence of
distinct interaction patterns for each of the two levels. At the interorganizational, the interactions
between the firms are defined by the decisions of their directors, however, the relationships are not
identical to their relationships. | |
