I found out that when you do File -> Import -> Existing projects into workspace
in Eclipse, I was using the wrong directory to start from.
When you initially clone the git repository, you have a spring-social-linkedin directory created which is the one you then cd to to do the gradlew operations. And then you have a second one which is created : git/spring-social-linkedin/spring-social-linkedin
.
This is this second one you need to select as the root directory to look at when you import the project into eclipse and everything will work fine.
Probably obvious for gradle knowledgeable people...