Social Capital

Conceptualizing Social Capital

In the contemporary academic literature, social capital is discussed in two related (but clearly different) ways. The first, primarily associated with sociologists Ronald Burt, Nan Lin, and Alejandro Portes, refers to the resources (e.g., information, ideas, support) that individuals are able to procure by virtue of their relationships with other people. These resources (“capital”) are “social” in that they are accessible only in and through these relationships, unlike physical (tools, technology) or human (education, skills) capital, for example, which are essentially the property of individuals. The structure of a given network—who interacts with whom, how frequently, and on what terms—thus has a major bearing on the flow of resources through that network. Those who occupy key strategic positions in the network, especially those whose ties span important groups, can be said to have more social capital than their peers precisely because their network position gives them heightened access to more and better resources. Controlling for other factors, the empirical evidence suggests that, at least in business organizations, employees with more social capital—that is, ties that uniquely connect them to key people—are evaluated more favorably by their colleagues and superiors, are promoted faster, and earn higher salaries.

The second (and more common) approach to social capital, one most closely associated with political scientist Robert Putnam, refers to the nature and extent of one's involvement in various informal and formal civic organizations. From chatting with neighbors and hosting card nights to joining environmental organizations and political parties, social capital in this sense is used as a conceptual term to characterize the many and varied ways in which a community's members interact. So understood, it is possible to conduct an “audit” of a community's associational life, and with it a sense of the state of its civic health. The most comprehensive contemporary evidence suggests that the United States is undergoing a sea change in the form and frequency with which its citizens engage one another, a change [Page 1259]comparable to that of the late nineteenth century, when technological advancement, urbanization, and economic transformation rendered obsolete a previous stock of social capital (one primarily centered on a rural society and agricultural economy). A range of social problems—crime, health, poverty, unemployment—have been linked empirically to a community's endowment of social capital (or lack thereof), and with them a concern among citizens and policymakers alike that new forms of social capital must be constructed, ones appropriate to the technological and demographic realities of the twenty-first-century information economy. The social capital trends in other countries, however, suggest a mixed picture; whether the United States is a harbinger of things to come, is an isolated case, or has made a less diligent effort to protect (or reinvent) its existing stocks than other countries is a question at the forefront of contemporary research.

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