Precarious decision making context 3: China
Creative Cluster development informed by a technology founded in emergent Social Capital and Styles of organizing
Authors: Junxiang Zhang and Patrick Humphreys (email p.humphreys@lse.ac.uk)
Abstract
By exploring how social capital is created and grown in a specific cluster, which adopts an innovative style of organizing, it will show how the creation and management of clusters, taking a bottom-up approach, is not only an economic issue, but also a social psychological one in a precarious decision-making context: seeking to provide practical solutions for building a sustainable creative cluster in China.
Here, the focus is on a specific case in Shanghai on the development of the creative Cluster called Xindanwei. The case findings indicate the emergent and context-based nature of social capital in tis precarious decision making context, which appears to originate from dynamic guanxi (with physical, institutional and mental elements) rather than static network. Social capital is usually perceived as individually owned asset, but here it can also be co-owned by participating members in cluster. The techniques used in the Xiananwei context order to generate social capital, are embedded in a technology providing a facilitative platform with multi-level installations., This also requires and enables cluster members to take productive actions and consider the context constraints in the real world. In the end, a facilitative framework to create social capital in clusters is proposed.
