Abstract
Social capital, which is developed through the interaction among people, is recognized to be valuable capital in business organizations. It has been considered that telework will reduce the opportunity to build social capital due to the lack of face-to-face interaction. However, some recent communication technologies have enabled people to interact in the cyberspace as if they were in the same location. Therefore, even in telework, social capital may be built by using such technologies. In this paper, the definition and the measurement of social capital in the society in general are described. Then several situations where communication technologies may be able to help building social capital are illustrated using OKI's "Choh-Rinjoukan" telework system. At the end, the way to measure social capital in working places and some hypotheses are proposed.
