LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Social Capital: Forms
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Even in non-hi-tech environments, social capital often leads to greater efficiency than purely formal coordination techniques. Classical Taylorism, which organized workplaces in a highly centralized, bureaucratized manner, created many inefficiencies as decisions were delayed and information distorted while moving up and down hierarchical chains of command. In many manufacturing facilities, Taylorism has been replaced by much flatter management structures which in effect push responsibility down to the factory floor itself. Workers who are much closer to the sources of local knowledge are authorized to make decisions on their own, rather than referring them up a managerial hierarchy. This often leads to great gains in efficiency,11 but is totally dependent on the social capital of the workforce. If there is distrust between workers and managers, or widespread opportunism, then the delegation of authority required in a typical "lean" manufacturing system will lead to instant paralysis.
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Some evidence has shown that the internet has neither increased nor decreased social capital. On the other hand, it has a supplementary effect on social capital. According to this argument, the internet adds on to other patterns of communication (Flangan and Metzger 2001). Indeed the internet is the same as other kinds of traditional communication forms (Quan-Hass and Wellman 2002). According to this notion email, chat and other communication capabilities of the internet supplement social contact by helping to people to organize meetings and social events; in this way it fills communication gaps, for example in face-to-face communication (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002, cited in Quan-Hass and Wellman 2002). Therefore, cyberspace provides an additional means of communication to telephone and face-to-face contact (Muller 1999).
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[T]he area where governments probably have the greatest direct ability to generate social capital is education. Educational institutions do not simply transmit human capital, they ... pass on social capital in the form of social rules and norms. This is true not just in primary and secondary education, but in higher and professional education as well. Doctors learn not just medicine but the Hippocratic oath; one of the greatest safeguards against corruption is to give senior bureaucrats high-quality professional training and to create an esprit de corps among this elite.
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The term "capital" is used by analogy with other forms of economic capital, as social capital is argued to have similar (although less measurable) benefits. However, the analogy with capital is misleading to the extent that, unlike traditional forms of capital, social capital is not depleted by use, but in fact depleted by non-use ("use it or lose it"). In this respect, it is similar to the now well-established economic concept of human capital.
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