Beyond Social Capital : A Critical Approach

Once a purely sociological concept, social capital has become a tool of economics along the lines of human capital. In the process, according to the contributors of these six papers, social capital has taken on empirical qualities that make it self-contradictory. They understand social capital to be primarily a social phenomenon residing in human relationships. They also hold that social capital generates costs as well as benefits. They describe the phenomenon and how it behaves, comment upon its use and misuse in economics, examine how social capital relates to institutions and trust, and reconstruct its links with entrepreneurship. Studies here measure the phenomenon in the UK, Sweden, Vietnam and Ethiopia, and together the collection supports a new social economic theory of social capital. This material was previously published as a special issue of The Review of Social Economy. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)