Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective

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Partha Dasgupta, Ismail Serageldin
World Bank Publications, 2000 - Political Science - 424 pages
This book provides an account of the current understanding of social capital. It covers both theoretical and empirical studies, and the concept is debated throughout. Also included in this volume is the classic 1987 article by the late James Coleman, 'Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital', which formed the basis for the development of social capital as an organizing concept in the social sciences. The volume is divided into areas that cover the analytical foundations and institutional and statistical analyses of social capital.
 

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Page 327 - Social capital [...] refers to features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions".
Page 46 - Social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors - whether persons or corporate actors - within the structure.
Page 19 - Physical capital is wholly tangible, being embodied in observable material form; human capital is less tangible, being embodied in the skills and knowledge acquired by an individual; social capital is even less tangible, for it is embodied in the relations among persons.
Page 329 - It can be plausibly argued that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence
Page 313 - Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?
Page 46 - ... (p. 598). In fact, this view of social capital captures social structure at large, as well as the ensemble of norms governing interpersonal behavior. A third and most encompassing view of social capital includes the social and political environment that enables norms to develop and shapes social structure.
Page 16 - Unlike other forms of capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between actors and among actors. It is not lodged either in the actors themselves or in physical implements of production".
Page 314 - ... mortality rate is the number of deaths of infants under one year of age per 1,000 live births in a given year.
Page 396 - A vertical network, no matter how dense and no matter how important to its participants, cannot sustain social trust and cooperation.
Page 15 - It is to import the economists' principle of rational action for use in the analysis of social systems proper, including but not limited to economic systems, and to do so without discarding social organization in the process. The concept of social capital is a tool to aid in this. In this paper, I introduce the concept in some generality, and then examine its usefulness in a particular context, that of education. SOCIAL CAPITAL Elements for these two intellectual traditions cannot be brought together...

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