Social capital

1
Social capital -

• Elisabeth Backe-Hansen, NOVA

2
The emperors new clothes.....

• Few books have probably influenced international
  debates about social politics as much as Robert
  Putnams Making democracy work from 1993
• Between 1991 and 2001 the number of scientific
  publications per year with social capital in the
  title, the abstract or among the key words
  increased from almost none to almost 250

3

• In Great Britain social capital has become a key
  concept governing policy-making
• Reparing and increasing social capital is seen as
  a way to alleviate social problems, including
  effects of globalisation and individualisation,
  fragmentation of society and diminishing
  political participation

4

• The concept attracts researchers from many
  disciplines, which makes for many different
  definitions
• Criticism is also rife, because of imprecise
  definitions, because the concept is seen as
  tautological and because negative effects of
  social capital are under-reported in much of the
  literature
• And a child and youth perspective is mostly
  lacking

5

• Even when one tries to operationalize social
  capital in a way that captures the well-being and
  life chances of children and young people, the
  question arises as to whether we are in essence
  talking about social networks thus the issue
  about whats new for our purposes

6
... Or a functional approach to defining
indicators?

• Still, it is argued by several authors that the
  concept holds out promises for looking at
  children and young peoples social networks in
  new ways, and
• The concept holds out promises for incorporating
  both structure and agency in thinking about
  children and young peples well-being

7
How has social capital been measured?

• Some authors have operationalized social capital
  directly and used measures based on such
  operationalisations
• The most well-known example the trust dimension
• In addition indicators based on bonding,
  bridging and linking social capital

8

• Second, and far more commonly so far, authors
  have constructed post-hoc indicators of social
  capital based on data that have already been
  collected for other purposes
• Examples
• School achievement (Young in Oslo, 2000)
• Positive development among at-risk youth

9
In conlusion...

• In spite of the criticism levelled at the
  concept, it still holds out promises of new
  knowledge
• However, the concept needs to be concretized
  according to each specific purpose
• When using the concept in relation to children
  and young peoples well-being, the network
  dimension seems most relevant