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SUMMARYAlthough intrinsic motivations receive increasing attention in explaining human actions, our knowledge on their causes and effects is incomplete. Quite surprisingly, the existing literature fails to consider the relationship between intrinsic motivations and social capital formation. The present paper increases the understanding on the effect of intrinsic motivations by studying the role that different motivations to volunteer have on the creation of volunteers' social capital which is intended as networks of cooperative relations.Our empirical analysis considers three indices of social capital, aimed at measuring both the quantitative (number) and the qualitative (degree of familiarity and cooperation) character of social relations, and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to volunteer (ideal motivations, the desire to feel useful to others, the pursuit of social recognition and the desire to increase the number of acquaintances or friends).We find that the creation of social capital through participation in voluntary associations is not indifferent to the motivations which induced the volunteer to start his/her unpaid activity. In particular, we show that intrinsic motivations enable people to extend their social networks by creating relations characterized by a significant degree of familiarity. By contrast, extrinsic motivations, and in particular the decision to join an association in order to increase the number of acquaintances or friends, promote the creation of networks from a quantitative point of view, but they do not facilitate the creation of relations based on a particular degree of confidence.

AbstractSocial capital theorists posit that association members are key agents for propagating norms of trust and trustworthiness from within associations toward the society as a whole. Nevertheless, others claim that social capital is primarily bonding, that is, it helps ingroup members better achieve internal goals, but little benefits or even costs carry over to the rest of society. We deploy experimental methods to probe into whether social capital in associations has a predominantly bridging or bonding nature. We compare members' behavior in anonymous Trust Games with behavior by a demographically comparable sample of non-members. We find that (a) Members are significantly more trusting and trustworthy than the general population both when interacting with fellow members and with people from the general population; (b) Members trust and repay trust from people from the general public nearly at the same level as they do with fellow members. Therefore, most of social capital existing within associations "bridges" over to the rest of society. We quantify 83% of additional trust, and 71% of additional trustworthiness existing in associations vis-à-vis society at large to be bridging and the remainder to be bonding. (c) Association members are no more optimistic or less accurate in predicting others' behavior than people from the general public. (d) Increased involvement in association activities is not correlated with increased pro-sociality.

This article analyzes the empirical relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social capital. The focus is on a specific kind of nonprofit organizations: the social cooperatives. With respect to the previous studies on the relationship between participation in nonprofit organizations and social capital creation, this article reveals a main reason of interest. The article points out the operational characteristics of nonprofit organizations and shows the importance of the adoption of CSR good practices in fostering the creation of workers' social capital intended as cooperative social network, generalized trust, and relational skills.

AbstractNew institutional economics (NIE) studies institutions and how they emerge, operate, and evolve. They also include organizational arrangements, intended as modes of governing economic transactions. Universities offer an exciting ground for testing the role of different institutional arrangements (governance forms) in coordinating (academic) transactions. In a context of contractual incompleteness where production is characterized by a highly specialized nature and requires the cooperation among co-essential figures, we argue that shared governance models (versus models with more concentrated authority) foster idiosyncratic investments in human capital and promotes performance. From the evolutionary viewpoint, we explain why institutions based on shared governance have developed within universities. The normative question of how universities should be governed is a debated issue in the literature. Since the 1980s, the new public management paradigm provides a theoretical framework that suggests analyzing university like firms. It is based on the firm's archetypical conception as top-down hierarchical organizations and as a descending sequence of principal–agent problems. We advance a different interpretation of the university–firm analogy leveraging on the NIE and its developments. To empirically analyze our hypothesis, we collected original data from Italian universities in 2015. We find that more shared decision-making processes are correlated with better research performance.

AbstractWe present an experiment that sets up a context of production of a common output obtained by using production means that are randomly and unequally distributed. Before the production phase, subjects must choose a distributive principle for the output division, under ignorance of the allocation of the production means. Subsequently, they make a distributive choice fully aware of their luck and performance. The aim of the experiment is to test, first, whether ordinary subjects in an impartial situation are capable of converging on a fair principle of distribution – able of redressing the arbitrariness of the initial production means allocation; and second, whether these same ordinary subjects are capable of actually following that principle in a real distributive choice that excludes coercion, reputation effects and other forms of social pressures. The main finding is that a distributive rule that redresses initial inequalities is both acceptedex-anteand actually appliedex-postby most individuals. Our conclusion is relevant for the issue of realism of normative theories of justice and the possibility of institution design aimed at implementing distributive justice principles and policies.