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There is no accepted general usage of the term social capital, at least not one from which measures of the structural aspects of social capital can be derived, in this paper, the authors propose a two-dimensional classification; one based on whether the focus is on individuals or groups of actors, the other on whether we look at internal or external ties. The authors then use this classification to categorize which existing network measures can be used to formalize the notion of social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network analysts have developed a number of techniques for identifying cohesive subgroups in networks. In general, however, no consideration is given to actors that do not belong to a given group. In this paper, we explore ways of identifying actors that are not members of a given cohesive subgroup, but who are sufficiently well tied to the group to be considered peripheral members. We then use this information to explore the structure of the network as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common but informal notion in social network analysis and other fields is the concept of a core/periphery structure. The intuitive conception entails a dense, cohesive core and a sparse, unconnected periphery. This paper seeks to formalize the intuitive notion of a core/periphery structure and suggests algorithms for detecting this structure, along with statistical tests for testing a priori hypotheses. Different models are presented for different kinds of graphs (directed and undirected, valued and nonvalued). In addition, the close relation of the continuous models developed to certain centrality measures is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]