IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/tjisxx/v20y2011i3p255-266.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Us and them: a social capital perspective on the relationship between the business and IT departments

Author

Listed:
  • Bart van den Hooff
  • Maarten de Winter

Abstract

In this paper, a social capital perspective is applied to the relationship between the IT department and the Business organization. IT and Business are conceptualized as different occupational communities, with different understandings of their work. Our focus is on the level of social capital and the process of knowledge sharing between these occupational communities. We analyze the role that these factors play in reaching a mutual understanding within the process of IS development, and the influence this has on the perceived performance of the IT organization. Our study, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, points out that a lack of social capital (structural, relational as well as cognitive) can serve as an explanation for the often problematic relationship between these communities. Our analyses also show that social capital is especially relevant for the Business organization's perception of IT performance, whereas the IT department's perception is that performance is primarily dependent on the exchange of information.

Suggested Citation

  • Bart van den Hooff & Maarten de Winter, 2011. "Us and them: a social capital perspective on the relationship between the business and IT departments," European Journal of Information Systems, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(3), pages 255-266, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:20:y:2011:i:3:p:255-266
    DOI: 10.1057/ejis.2011.4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1057/ejis.2011.4
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/ejis.2011.4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:20:y:2011:i:3:p:255-266. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/tjis .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.