This article offers a new interpretation of the Baring crisis, the most dramatic financial collapse of the nineteenth century, by focusing on how information brokerage allowed Barings to abandon its risk-averse practices in the mid 1880s. I argue that the mediators who bridged structural holes (gaps between social clusters) shaped actors’ access to information as well as their expectations regarding its quality. Information brokers who enjoyed philos ties with at least one of the parties connected by the bridging relationships could promote collaborative arrangements more likely to survive an environment of heightened uncertainty. The performance of such brokers in the 1880s enabled cooperation between Baring Brothers & Co. and the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas and supported the London house's growing association with the Anglo-Argentine firm of S. B. Hale & Co. in the second half of the 1880s. Cooperation gave Barings an illusion of security amid the costs of increasing competition and supported the house's growing engagement in South American affairs. Nevertheless, the strategy proved ineffective at barring the entry of new players. By the late 1880s, ties produced by brokerage connected Barings to the house's former competitors, producing a cohesive social cluster. Barings thereafter had access to redundant information, which hindered the house's ability to assess risk.

Museums are organizations that need to maintain relationships with several stakeholders in order to achieve their economic and social objectives. In this context, the current paper explores the effect of an organization’s bonding social capital and a manager’s social capital on the organization’s ability to build external relationships, in other words, bridging social capital. Results from the study indicate that the structure of internal social capital (cohesion and diversity) and the manager’s role as a bridging tie facilitate relations with stakeholders and other museum networks. Moreover, collective social capital (bonding and bridging) has a direct impact on innovative proposals, on the museum’s image and on incomes, all of which entail key management implications.

A long-standing debate has taken place in the organizational sociology and social network literatures about the relative advantages of network closure versus structural holes in the generation of social capital. There is recent evidence that these advantages differ across cultures and between East Asia and the West in particular, but existing network models are unable to explain why or address cultural variation in general. This paper seeks to provide a solution by integrating a culture-embedded rational model of action into the social network model of structure, using this not only to re-examine the closure versus structural hole debate, but also to tie it to the literature on Confucian capitalism and the ‘East Asian Model’ of the firm. We argue that this integrated approach allows us to systematically analyse the relationship between culture and behaviour in networks and, more specifically, to explain why closure has been a more powerful source of productivity in East Asia than the West.