DEA method, Tongtong Jiang( 2011 ) evaluated the efficiency of 59 universities
directly administered by China Ministry of Education (MOE), and found that the
ratio of staff with PhD, the ratio of staff titled master or PhD supervisor, are both
significantly and positively associated with universities’efficiency.
6.1.3.3 Structure of Social Capital of University Staff
In sociological terms, social capital is the direct or indirect economic benefits
derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and
groups (Bian and Qiu 2000 ). In the network of researchers, social capital is
extremely important. It’s also discussed the importance of organizational environ-
ment to research production of faculty from the perspective of social capital, and
pointed out that the research productivities of faculty is influenced by the factors
such as the existence and intensity of social network in university organizations, the
individual’s position in that social network, the trusts between organizations and
their members.
Inbreeding is a typical strong social capital in university both at home and
abroad, so some researchers focus on the linkage between inbreeding and research
productivity. On the one hand, some researchers found the linkage is significant
negative. Liang et al. ( 2015 ) researched on the impacts of inbreeding on faculty’s
research productivity, and found that the closeness of academic relation was neg-
atively correlated with the number of research projects with statistical significance.
The closer the academic relation is, the fewer the number of research projects would
be. And a comparison of number of publications showed that, closer academic
relation would reduce the number of publications. On the one hand, some
researchers found the linkage is not significant, or even positive. Taking faculty of
Jilin University as the sample, Sun ( 2004 ) found that social capital didn’t have
significant impacts on research productivities. By further classify social capital into
several aspects such as prestige, activeness, sensitivity and powers (including
political power and cultural power), Sun found that all these still play a key role in
research process.
6.1.4 Comments......................................
Through reviewing the related studies on the impact factors of university research
efficiency, we canfind the following points.
First, there are many factors impacting on university research efficiency, and
different factors might have correlations or interactions with each other. So, in
empirical studies, we should not only select the suitable variables based on the
research focus, but also control for the compounding factors such as university type,
and location.
270 6 Exploring Factors Impacting on Research Efficiency...