Essay On Social Capital

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SOCIAL CAPITAL : DEFINITION

The World Bank (1993) defines that “Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions....Social capital is not just the sum of the institutions which underpin a society – it is the glue that holds them together”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

The term “social capital” has a long intellectual history in social sciences (Platteau, 1994; Woolcock, 1998), but the sense in which the term is used today dates back to 1916 to the writings of Lyda J Hanifan (1916 :130) citied the concept of social capital as: “those tangible substances that count for most in the daily lives of people; namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, social intercourse among the individuals and the families who make up a social unit....if an individual comes into contact with his neighbours. These are accumulation of social capital and which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in whole community.

After Hanifan’s writings, the idea …show more content…

Indeed, although their approaches were rather different, he collaborated for a while with Bourdieu, co-chairing a 1989 conference in Chicago, and co-editing a 1991 book, on ‘Social Theory in a Changing Society’. Coleman also linked social capital with economics, but in a different way. He sought to combine the insights of sociology and economic theory, seeing social capital as a way of making sense of the overly rational and individualistic models of traditional economics. Coleman’s approach leads to a broader view of social capital, where it is not seen only as stock held by powerful elites, but notes its value for all kinds of communities, including the powerless and