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The attempts to conceptualize social capital have resulted in the identification of many different types and characteristics of social capital in the literature. The most common ones refer to the distinction of bonding and bridging, as well as structural and cognitive social capital (Halpern 2004). Bonding social capital is between individuals within a group or community (horizontal ties), whereas bridging is between individuals and organizations in different communities (vertical ties) (Dolfsma and Dannreuther 2003; Narayan 2002). Bonding social capital is related to thick trust, while bridging social capital is closely related to thin trust (Anheier and Kendall 2002).

Most of the literature refers to the Granovetter’s (1992) introduced division between between the ‘structural’ and ‘relational’ social capital. The first one conforms to the view that social capital constitutes aspects of social structure, and therefore relates to the properties of the social system and the form of social organization. It is the network relationships, but not the quality of these relationships, since the quality of relationships is the relational dimension. Structural social capital facilitates access to the exchange and transfer of knowledge and makes it easier for people to engage in mutually beneficial collective action by lowering transaction costs and improving social learning (Uphoff and Wijayaratna 2000; Ansari, Munir, and Gregg 2012; Andrews 2010). Relational social capital refers to the nature, characteristics and quality of the relationships within networks, such as trust, obligations, respect and even friendship (Lefebvre et al. 2016; Gooderham 2007; Cabrera and Cabrera 2005).

Furthermore, extending the major themes initiated by the studies of Coleman (1988, 1990) and Burt (2000) on social capital, it is important to distinguish the networks ‘with closure’ or ‘without closure’. The argument for social capital with closure is that it creates strong interconnected elements, and the environment in which everyone is connected (dense network) is the source of social capital (bonding social capital). Coleman (1990) claims that social relations can save time by accessing direct information from different actors. Moreover, according to Coleman, network closure “facilitates sanctions that make it less risky for people in the network to trust” (Burt 2000). Thus, he argues that networks with a closed structure are better at facilitating social capital, as demonstrated in Figure 1.1(a), than social networks characterized by an open structure, which is illustrated by Figure 1.1(b).

Figure 1.1. Social network without and with “closure”

Source: Coleman (1988).

Burt (1992), who introduced the concept of structural hole in networks, argues, on the contrary, that low density and connectivity are the most beneficial features of a social network. He claims that social capital is created by a network in which people can broker connections (“bridging capital”) (2000). Structural holes mean that an individual has persons in his or her network that do not know each other, and this is defined as “a relationship of non-redundancy between two contacts”, which is illustrated by the hole between contacts in a network that do not have any relationship with each other. This way, that person is more likely to have access to so-called non-redundant information, i.e. information that is fresher and more unique. In turn, Coleman concludes that the quality of information may in fact deteriorate as it moves through different chains of intermediaries. Notwithstanding, Burt (2000) resolves this disagreement in such a way that dense or hierarchical networks lower the risk associated with transaction and trust, whereas the hole argument describes how structural holes are opportunities to add value with brokerage across the holes.

Moreover, Granovetter (1973) distinguishes between strong and weak ties and states that the strength of a social tie is defined by a combination of the time invested, the emotional intensity, the intimacy or mutual confiding between the actors. In other words, ties with a higher degree of emotional involvement are more important in the discovery of a business opportunity, and weak ties become more important when exploiting these opportunities. The described relationship would look as follows: if A has ties with B and A has ties with C, then the amount of time that C spends with B depends (at least in part) on the amount of time that A spends with B and C, respectively. If C and B have no relationship, common strong ties to A will probably bring them into interaction and generate one. Granovetter (1973) refers to that as “the strength of weak ties”. The propensity of two nodes that are indirectly connected to form a link is also referred to as the “triadic closure” in the literature (Carayol et al. 2014). The “triadic closure” networks (collaboration with a partner of a partner) are particularly advantageous for international collaborations, in which reliability of different partners may be difficult to assess.

In the context of cluster ecosystem interlinkages, strong ties describe strong relationships, based on trust and are characterized by frequent interaction (both formal and informal one) which lead to a greater exchange of knowledge (Burt 2009; Rowley et al. 2000). At the same time, weak ties could potentially add heterogeneity to the knowledge base of cluster actors.

Table 1.1 presents the classification of the characteristics of bonding and bridging social capital based on the above-presented literature.

Table 1.1. Bonding vs. bridging social capital

Bonding social capital	Bridging social capital
Within	Between
Closed	Open
Inward looking	Outward looking
Horizontal	Vertical
Strong ties	Weak ties
Thick trust	Thin trust
Network closure	Structural holes

Source: Ramos-Pinto (2012).

Notwithstanding, the classification made above may lead to an overly simplified and even contradictory image of the social capital networks. In practice, social relationships are far more complicated and usually accompanied by multiple overlapping relationships that individuals have with each other. Thus, a typical relationship would have some characteristics of bonding and some characteristics of bridging social networks. Last but not least, bonding and bridging are not completely mutually exclusive and the final structure of the network configuration depends on the type of knowledge interlinkages present in a particular cluster, its technological dynamics, as well as the importance of other dimensions of social capital, i.e. physical, cognitive, organizational, cultural and communication ones.