The eight organizations: parents' groups, civic groups, local businesses, churches, social services, mental-health providers, juvenile justice agencies, and the police.
Two explanations for how many organizations a school works with
Two bodies of research explain why an organization ends up with many outside connections. They disagree about what a high number means.
Social capital, as Nan Lin sets it out, says that reach is something you accumulate by being well placed. He and Mary Dumin measure it with a tool called a position generator: a list of jobs from the best paid to the worst paid, and a question asking which of them you could get to through someone you know. The better placed you start, the more of that ladder you can reach. On that account a wide network is a sign of an organization doing well, and organizations in poorer or more troubled places should have narrower ones. William Julius Wilson described exactly that for poor neighborhoods: the people there are cut off from the institutions that would connect them elsewhere.
Our measure works the same way, with organizations in place of jobs. The survey names eight kinds of body, covering welfare, justice, civil society, business and religion, and asks which of them the school works with. That swap is ours and it is not exact. Lin counts access across jobs that can be ranked from top to bottom, and nothing ranks these eight. Only one part carries over: counting how many different kinds an organization can reach.
Because the eight organizations are different kinds rather than more of the same, a higher count means variety rather than volume. Each extra one reaches something the others do not, which is what Ronald Burt means by a tie that is not redundant. Lin's name for the whole quantity is extensity. That is why this is Lin's kind of social capital and not James Coleman's. Coleman's kind is closure, meaning dense ties that loop back on each other and let a group hold people to its rules. A count of kinds measures no closure at all. It measures how many different kinds a school can get to.
Resource dependence, as Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik set it out, says the opposite about what a wide network means. No organization is self-sufficient. Every organization needs things it does not control, and needing them gives whoever supplies them power over it. Building outside ties is one of the ways an organization manages that problem. On this account a wide network is a sign of an organization under pressure.
The question is older than either book. Sidney Levine and Paul White asked it of health agencies in 1961. Michael Aiken and Jerald Hage made the count itself the outcome in 1968, asking of sixteen health and welfare organizations in one city what predicted how many joint programs each one held. Their answers, organizational complexity and program innovation, are recognizably the same thing we find. With sixteen organizations that all dealt with each other, they could not separate the two explanations. Thirteen thousand schools that have no dealings with one another can.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Research on why organizations form partnerships usually splits the question in two: what pushes an organization to look for partners at all, and how it then picks particular ones through the network it already sits in. Schools in this survey have no dealings with one another, so the second question does not arise. A school cannot pick a partner because another school picked it first. That leaves the first question open to a clean test.