‘Classic’ accounts of social capital have emerged in accounts of stable networks or institutional environments. These conditions do not apply in the case of many firms – a case in point being small firm networks that rely on rapid turnover of projects. Our research team is attempting to identify how social capital is manifest in these contexts, and thus to make suggestions for building, maintaining and refreshing such capital. We present work to date that specifies a system to convert this type of tacit knowledge into sets of explicit and manageable local data by combining ‘expertise’ data with ‘soft’ attributes for compatibility and confidence that are extracted from social interactions. We also provide examples of information visualizations for profiling and retrieval that support the management of social capital.
