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Social Capital: Societies
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Apart from religion, shared historical experience can shape informal norms and produce social capital. Both Germany and Japan experienced considerable labor unrest and conflict between workers, managers, and the state in the 1920s and 30s. The Nazis and Japan's military rulers ultimately suppressed independent labor unions and replaced them with "yellow" ones. After their defeat in World War II, the democratic successor regimes opted for a much more consensual approach to management-labor relations that produced Germany's postwar Sozialmarktwirtschaft and Japan's lifetime employment system. Whatever their current dysfunctions, these institutions played a critical role in allowing the two societies to return to growth after the war, and constituted a form of social capital.
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Social capital, referring to connections within and between social networks, is a core concept in business, economics, organizational behaviour, political science, public health, sociology and natural resources management. Though there are in fact a variety of inter-related definitions of this term, which has been described as "something of a cure-all"[1] for the problems of modern society, they tend to share the core idea "that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups".[2]
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The concept that underlies social capital is old. Philosophers who emphasized the relation between pluralistic associational life and democracy implicitly used it as early as the 19th century. These theorists include James Madison (The Federalist), Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), and many authors in the dominant, pluralist tradition in American political science. In fact, John Dewey referred to "social capital" in School & Society in 1900 but he did not offer a definition of it.
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