The Role of Social Networks and in the Knowledge Society

There is a widespread opinion that individuals who left Croatia function better in “foreign” social frameworks, that they are more productive than they would be in Croatia, and that their knowledge is better used in more developed environments than here. Such premises point to the conclusion that the productivity of individuals depends on the social framework – on a special type of their social networking, and not on the lack of their knowledge and abilities, therefore it is not a question of a lack of personal knowledge, but of their social “drive”. One of the main goals of the project is to examine forms of social networking due to which existing knowledge and education are underutilized. The working hypothesis is that the reason for their lack of use is a lack of social networking. // Theoreticians of the knowledge society and networking state that the amount of knowledge and the intensity of interactions of individuals brings a special economic “added value” to society: “networked knowledge” becomes the so-called “endogenous factor”. This means that in the so-called knowledge society, we cannot rely on personal knowledge and the abstract sum of the abilities of individuals, nor on their simple pragmatic-economic application. Knowledge societies also rely on a kind of “spill-over” – the spillover of existing knowledge into other sectors. Recently, at the time of “excessive” investments in IT companies, theoreticians and entrepreneurs claimed that because of this, some companies will fail, but it is much more important that in the process, social profit will still be realized by the fact that many other companies will join the environment of such IT companies non-scientific sectors and entrepreneurs, so the economy will ultimately profit from this process, despite the missed investments. // The main goal of the project is to determine which forms of networking of individual knowledge are appropriate for increasing productivity in Croatia. We will test the working hypothesis according to which the intensity of networking is a function of the educational structure or education of a person. (We will test this assumption using Gladwell’s “tipping point” model, Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” decision model, and Gigerenzer’s “sharp heuristics” model.) In several sectors (education, science, small businesses) we will examine existing forms of networking (and assuming that network hierarchies are wrong), in order to determine what causes suboptimal social results in Croatia.