Leveraging Social Capital for Strategy Formulation: Lessons from Practice in three Institutional Contexts

It is well established that social capital has many benefits, including access to information and resources, for organizations and individuals. However, the mechanisms through which managers activate their ties to leverage such benefits are still not well understood. In this paper, we study how managers activate their social capital to identify relevant information and build new frameworks for formulating competitive strategies. A comparative study of managers from Germany, India, and China is expected to provide deeper insights into the specific information gathering activities and kinds of social capital that managers use to formulate their competitive strategies. Further, we make an attempt to provide institutional explanations to the mechanisms employed by managers in their respective country environments.