LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Social Capital: People
built 656 days ago
Social capital is mutually respectful relationships, connectedness and trustworthiness among people. It's ... networks and involvement. The term social capital was coined by social scientist James Coleman to describe "community ties," and Robert Putnam furthered popularized this research in his book, "Bowling Alone."
Source:
Most ways of measuring social capital have to do with trust - people who trust that favours and help will be available when they need it will favour and help others more. Those who are seen as trying to get a free ride will get much less help. A social climber tries to earn social capital by making friends with those who have it but without actually helping. Some call this kind of person a social parasite. They are very hard to detect, unlike people who cheat or commit fraud. When there are too many of these kinds of people, especially when they are politicians, people begin to mistrust their government.
Source:
Social capital is a core concept in business, economics, organizational behaviour, political science, and sociology, defined as the advantage created by a person's location in a structure of relationships. It explains how some people gain more success in a particular setting through their superior connections to other people.
Source:
Third, states indirectly foster the creation of social capital by efficiently providing necessary public goods, particularly property rights and public safety. Diego Gambetta has shown that the Sicilian Mafia can be understood as a private protector of property rights in a part of Italy where the state has historically failed to perform this function.28 Something similar to this has sprung up in Russia during the 1990s. Private property rights protection is very inferior to the state-supplied version, since there is nothing to prevent these private providers from getting into a host of other illegal activities as well. There are ... economies of scale in the deployment of coercive force used to enforce property rights. People cannot associate, volunteer, vote, or take care of one another if they have to fear for their lives when walking down the street. Given a stable and safe environment for public interaction and property rights, it is more likely that trust will arise spontaneously as a result of iterated interactions of rational individuals.
Source:
[T]he social capital concept may ... be applied as a useful tool for analysing social inequalities. In this sense it may enlighten the socially unequal embeddings of people and the unequal (dis)advantages people get out of these relations. It may show how people associate selectively and thus reproduce social stratification: Dominant actors are able to secure and monopolize their access to power and assets on the cost of others by means of social closure. This view is closely related with the work of Pierre Bourdieu. But nevertheless an overoptimistic and normative use of social capital pretending to be a collective social good holds the danger to camouflage exactly these inequalities and replace the concept of social justice. This risk seems to apply especially to neo-communitarian approaches closely related to the name Robert D. Putnam defining social capital as â€features of social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit†(Putnam 1993: 36).
Source:
There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which is one of its weaknesses. One can usually intuitively sense the level/amount of social capital present in a given relationship (regardless of type or scale), but quantitatively measuring it has proven somewhat complicated. This has resulted in different metrics for different functions. In measuring political social capital, it is common to take the sum of society’s membership of its groups. Groups with higher membership (such as political parties) contribute more to the amount of capital than groups with lower membership, although many groups with low membership (such as communities) still add up to be significant. While it may seem that this is limited by population, this need not be the case as people join multiple groups.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
People