Research on Structural Holes: An Assessment on Measurement Issues.

Summary Social capital theory generally analyzes network structures by focusing on the connections between players. Yet, several authors suggest that the absence of relations in a network, known as "structural holes", is meaningful. The aim of this paper is to provide an exhaustive survey of the academic research dedicated to the study of structural holes and to develop a precise undertsanding of its main measurements. Based on a bibliometric approach, we identify a typology of practices, developments, and issues related to structural holes. We highlight a set of articles on the operationalization of structural holes and discuss the various measures they propose. We provide numerical examples emphasizing the respective advantages and limitations of the studied measures. Based on these results, we suggest a guide on how to use existing measures of structural holes according to the type of network, i.e. in simple and complex networks.