Social Network and Inter-Organizational Learning: The Case of a Brazilian Cooperative of Fish-Farmers

Copyright © 2013 Andreia Maria Kremer, Edson Talamini. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution LiceNES, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The inter-organizational learning approach has shown considerable growth in recent years. The concepts of trust and cooperation between individuals present in the New Economic Sociology (NES) approach of social relations emerge with great emphasis and are gaining prominence as a facilitator and propellant mechanism in transferring knowledge inside networks. This study aims to analyze the learning networks formed by fish-farmers organized into a cooperative to identify the characteristics of the network through structural analysis and identification of its critical actors. The study was performed with thirteen fish-farmers of a cooperative headquartered in Mundo Novo county, which is located in Mato Grosso do Sul state in the Midwest region of Brazil. Questionnaires and interviews with closed and open ques-tions were used to collect the data. Measures of centrality (for individuals), density and reciprocity (in relations between individuals) were obtained from ORA software. The findings revealed that experience exchanges between fish-farmers, events participation, meetings attendance, speech audience and technical advice are the main forms of inter-organiza-tional learning. Results suggest that the network has low levels of cohesion and that it is not taking advantage of its ful