By John Field
The time period 'social capital' is a manner of conceptualizing the intangible assets of group, shared values and belief upon which we attract way of life. It has completed huge foreign money within the social sciences during the very diverse paintings of Bourdieu in France, and James Coleman and Robert Putnam within the States, and has been taken up inside of politics and sociology as a way of explaining the decline of social harmony and neighborhood values in lots of Western societies. This concise creation, the one one at the moment to be had, explains the theoretical underpinning of the topic, the empirical paintings that has been performed to discover its operation, and the impact that it has had on policy-making rather inside of such overseas governmental our bodies because the international financial institution and the ecu fee. With real cross-disciplinary allure, this unheard of ebook should be of serious curiosity to scholars of sociology, politics and social coverage.
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Additional info for Social Capital 2nd Edition (Key Ideas)
Sample text
FROM METAPHOR TO CONCEPT Social capital was, therefore, to be treated as a public rather than private good (Coleman 1994: 312). Yet he still had difficulty in refining his definition to fit with rational choice theory. Whereas Bourdieu could fit his simplified and individualistic notion of social capital into a wider picture of actors who were concerned to reproduce social and economic inequality, Coleman’s definition remained both abstract and functionalist. For Coleman, Social capital is defined by its function.
This ‘unusually civic generation’, forced into cooperative habits and values by ‘the great mid-century global cataclysm’ of war and reconstruction, is 39 40 FROM METAPHOR TO CONCEPT being inexorably replaced by others who are less civic minded (Putnam 2000: 275). Putnam then poses the question: so what? Does it matter that America’s social capital is in decline? Putnam answers these questions by a number of attempts to investigate the relationship between social capital and such indicators of well-being as education, economic prosperity, health, happiness and democratic engagement.
De Tocqueville 1832: Book 2, Ch. VII) For de Tocqueville, then, associational life was an important foundation of social order in a relatively open, clearly post-aristocratic system. A high level of civic engagement, far from inviting despotism, taught people how to cooperate across civil life; it was the nursery of a democratic society. Putnam’s message has found such a wide audience precisely because he suggests that the Tocquevillian foundation stone of American democracy is starting to crumble.
