Banking on social capital: towards social connectedness in distributed engineering design teams

The idea of an engineering design team as a closely knit, physically co-located community is dissolving as companies become increasingly geographically dispersed. Engineers work together with more people than ever before, but often with very limited knowledge of who they are actually working with, what their collaborators know, and to what extent they can be trusted. Engineering design is a domain where good decision-making is absolutely critical, and building social capital is particularly significant since engineers deal with inherently ambiguous requirements and problems. The fieldwork presented below suggests that ‘Know-Who’ is a key dimension of expertise sharing in distributed collaborative engineering.