Kristine Berzina

Faculty of Economics and Management

University of Latvia

Enterprise related social capital: different levels of social capital accumulation

E-mail: evf1@lanet.lv

ABSTRACT. Success of the enterprise is related to many aspects of the enterprise – economic and managerial covering influenced by many layers of the external environment. The enterprise as such can be viewed as a form of social capital, consisting on different relationships. In the same way the whole external environment of the enterprise can be analysed as the set of different relationships that are interrelated, interacting and thus influencing the operation of every enterprise.

The paper displays different aspects of social capital with the aim to analyse enterprise related social capital and its different levels of accumulation in the organisations and firms. Accordingly the research tasks are: to cover all the basic theoretical aspects that are related to the social capital; inspect more in details different approaches to define social capital, social capital characteristics, comprising elements, social capital types; investigation of enterprise related social capital as the background for relationships among enterprises, including challenges and problems connected with the social capital measurement.

Received: July, 2011

1st Revision: September, 2011

Accepted: October, 2011

JEL Classification: P31

Keywords: social capital, enterprise related social capital, cooperation, networking, partnerships.