SOCIAL CAPITAL AND VIRTUALITY: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

This article is based on the series of three research studies conducted during 2013 at the Polytechnic of Zagreb. It explores the nature of relationships between reality and virtuality, and its multi-layered relationships with social capital, business opportunities, and voluntary online engagement. It shows that motivators for participation in social networking are very similar to motivators for participation in FLOSS movement. It concludes that social capital, as one of the main driving forces of humanity, is much more important than the used technology. However, it also warns that organizational structure and ethics within a community profoundly impact processes of creating and maintaining social capital, and that the concept of social capital is dialectically intertwined with material gains. In this way, it provides a whole-rounded theoretical framework unavailable to solitary research efforts, warns about various methodological restrictions to found conclusions, and calls for further investigation of the notion of social capital at the fringes between reality and virtuality