Construct · 6 fields · 13 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningintellectual capitalcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to social capital is intellectual capital.
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The resources a person can draw on by virtue of membership in a durable network of relationships, which Bourdieu in 1986 set alongside economic and cultural capital and insisted was convertible into them, and unequally distributed. Coleman in 1988 kept the resource idea but moved it out of the person: social capital is a feature of social structure that makes certain actions possible, and its purest form is closure, the dense ties that let norms be enforced and obligations trusted. The two founders disagree on whether it belongs to the individual or the structure, and everyone after them inherits the ambiguity.[1][2]
Features of social organisation (networks, norms, and trust) that facilitate coordination for mutual benefit. Putnam fixed the phrase in 1993 by using it to explain why northern Italian regional governments outperformed southern ones, and in 1995 by arguing that American civic participation had declined for a generation. The unit became a region or a country and the indicators became choral societies, newspaper readership, and generalised trust items. Nothing here is a resource anyone owns; it is a property of a community, and it is the meaning most of the public knows.[3][4]
A characteristic of places that shapes the health of the people in them. Kawachi, Kennedy, Lochner, and Prothrow-Stith took Putnam's indicators in 1997 (per-capita group membership and the share of residents who think most people would take advantage of you) measured them across US states, and showed they mediated the link between income inequality and age-adjusted mortality. Social capital here is an exposure, like air quality, and the individual-level mechanism is left open; epidemiology then spent a decade arguing whether the effect was contextual or a compositional artefact of who lives where.[5]
A person's social characteristics, including social skills, charisma, and network position, that let them extract market and non-market returns from interactions with others. Glaeser, Laibson, and Sacerdote in 2002 rebuilt the concept as an individual investment decision, with age, mobility, and occupation predicting how much a person accumulates, and explicitly rejected Putnam's community-level version as unusable in a model of choice. Arrow in 2000 doubted the term altogether: capital implies deliberate sacrifice now for return later, and most networks are built for their own sake. The economists' meaning is the narrowest and the only one that asks whether the word capital is earned.[6][7]
The advantage a person gets from where they sit in a network, measured on the network itself. Burt in 1992 argued that the advantage lies in brokerage: a person whose contacts are not connected to each other spans a structural hole and controls the flow of information and opportunity between them, which is the opposite of Coleman's closure. Lin in 1999 defined social capital as resources embedded in a network and accessed through ties, and tied it to status attainment through the resources of one's contacts. This is the one meaning with a formal measure of the structure, and its central empirical finding is that sparse networks pay.[8][9][10]
The sum of actual and potential resources embedded in, available through, and derived from a network of relationships possessed by an individual or a social unit. Nahapiet and Ghoshal fixed it in 1998 with three dimensions (structural (who you reach and how), relational (trust, norms, obligations, identification), and cognitive (shared codes and narratives)) and argued the combination is why firms create intellectual capital better than markets do. Adler and Kwon's 2002 review counted the definitions in circulation and found they split on whether the capital lies in external ties or internal cohesion, and warned that a concept with both a bridging and a bonding face, and with benefits that turn into costs, needs its boundaries drawn before it is measured. Most management surveys since then use the three-dimension scheme with the warning unread.[11][12]
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