Assessing social capital accumulation in service system development with service-dominant logic view

Abstract

Under the global trend of urbanization, a city ecosystem could be viewed as an integration of various service systems with the Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) view. To study the composition of the service systems, social capital accumulation could be used to assess the resource distribution in the system development under the value-oriented perspectives of S-DL. Prior researches on related topics usually focused on the performance of social capital. This paper aims to assess social capital by studying the resource integration process, and to answer how social capital was accumulated along with the service system development. Grounded on the S-DL, this research studies the service system development of a traditional market revitalization project by actor-network analysis using the field data from a 30-month ethnographical work. A conceptual framework integrating social capital theory and S-DL perspective was developed. We demonstrate the process of evaluating the social capital generation and integration during value creation, which approaches its accumulation process. We anticipate the framework of accessing the social capital accumulation can reveal the structural holes of service systems by analyzing the accumulated conditions, facilitating the involved actors' decision making, and communicating the value propositions with the public.