Social Capital

The term social capital refers either to the capacity of an individual to obtain valued material or symbolic goods by virtue of his or her social relationships and group memberships or to the capacity of a plurality of persons to enjoy the benefits of collective action by virtue of their own social participation, trust in institutions, or commitment to established ways of doing things. The former capacity has been called “relational social capital” and the latter “institutional social capital” (Krishna 2000). The common element underlying both types of social capital is social embeddedness. Individual and collective action alike are enabled and constrained by the resources that actors can leverage within and between levels of social structure.

Like the complementary concept of “human capital” (the knowledge, skill, and understanding acquired by persons through training and experience), the concept of social capital stems from an analogy to physical and financial capital. Capital in general refers to finite assets available for purposive deployment in the satisfaction of future wants (rather than present consumption). Capital assets accumulate as stocks. Put to productive use, they generate flows of benefits for the asset holder and his or her exchange partners. Capital assets are said to be “fungible” (interchangeable), “transferable” (conveyable from one place or situation to another), and “alienable” (transferable in ownership). Since social capital is only slightly fungible, mildly transferable, and inalienable, some economists—for example, Kenneth Arrow—reject the analogy to capital theory. However stretched the analogy may be, the concept of social capital captures something that most sociologists consider an elemental truth—that the resources embedded in social structures facilitate individual and collective action, and generate flows of benefits for persons, groups, and communities.

No one knows who first used the term social capital in the ways defined above. Robert D. Putnam nominates L. Judson Hanifan on the basis of the Progressive educator's 1916 essay on community centers. “The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself,” Hanifan (1916) observed of the rural poor in West Virginia. “If he comes into contact with his neighbors, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community” (p. 130). The core elements of the concept are clearly present in this quotation: agential capacitation through relationship formation, interdependent asset cumulation, and “social potentiality,” the facilitation of collective ends.

Two contemporary social theorists who developed the concept's theoretical potential are Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman. Bourdieu arrived at the concept independently, while Coleman built on economist and policy analyst Glenn Loury's use of the term to designate all the family, class, and neighborhood characteristics that affect actors' investments in human capital. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) define social capital as the actual or potential resources at play in the “field of the social”—that is, in the sphere of “mutual acquaintance and recognition” (p. 1991). For Bourdieu, modern society is an ensemble of relatively autonomous fields—for example, the religious field, the linguistic field, the economic field, each with its own strategic logic and specific form of capital—religious capital, linguistic capital, economic capital, and so on. Of these, the most important, the one that exerts the greatest force on the other fields, is the economic. Having limited social capital to the sphere of direct social relations, [Page 716]Bourdieu devoted his prodigious research efforts to the study of other forms of capital, particularly cultural capital.

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