Abstract:
Introduction and Review Approach
Four decades back, Granovetter (1973) postulated social capital as a collective resource to
attain knowledge flow through weak bridging ties. Since then, scholarly work linking social capital
with knowledge transfer has received attention of social researchers. Recent publications such as
Bodin and Crona (2009) has focused more on structural dimension of social capital and how such
networks facilitate collaboration among actors for generation, acquisition and diffusion of different
types of tacit and explicit knowledge. In spite of the acknowledgement of structural social capital as a
stimulus for effective knowledge transfer among different stakeholders in intra and inter
organizational settings, literature reviews focused in this integration is yet limited in the body of
knowledge. The primary objective of this paper is to perform an integrative literature review to
explore the potential role of structural social capital for effective knowledge transfer in intra and inter
organizational settings. The sources for this synthesis include refereed journal articles, book chapters,
and other publications between year 2000 and 2015. The databases examined included Emerald
insight, Jastor, EBSCO Host, Taylor and Fransis, Sage, Springer and Google scholar. The criteria for
selection began with a search command that combined two key words “social capital” and “knowledge
transfer”, which later enhanced to “social networks”, “structural social capital”, “knowledge
management” and “knowledge sharing”
