Is Social Capital a Good Concept?

This paper explores whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taking Gerring’s work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual ‘goodness’ and discusses how social capital perform...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social indicators research 2013-12, Vol.114 (3), p.1225-1242
Main Authors: Bjornskov, Christian, Sonderskov, Kim Mannemar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Conceptualization
Cooperation
Cultural Capital
Economics
Educational Sociology
Evaluation
Functionalism
History, theory and methodology
Human Geography
Individualized Instruction
Methodology
Microeconomics
Morality
Parsimony
Political science
Principal components analysis
Public Health
Quality of Life Research
Social capital
Social interaction
Social norms
Social organization
Social research
Social Sciences
Sociology
Studies
Unidimensional scales
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Summary:This paper explores whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taking Gerring’s work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual ‘goodness’ and discusses how social capital performs on these criteria. It is argued that social capital eventually may be a good concept if it can be shown empirically to be a unidimensional concept. An empirical section therefore explores the validity of the unidimensionality assumption and rejects it in four separate tests at both the individual and aggregate level. We conclude that even if social capital has been a remarkably productive idea, it is not a good concept as most popular conceptualizations define social capital as several distinct phenomena or as phenomena that already have been conceptualized under other labels.
ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/s11205-012-0199-1