Some reading:
"
Fine’s eleven arguments concerning Social Capital
- Social capital ranges across all forms of human interaction and its applications have been “astonishingly diverse”;
- Social capital as a term is parasitical on social theory and draws the critical component out of the concepts appropriated by those wedded to the term in their writings;
- The term itself is an oxymoron, presuming that there can be a capital that is not social;
- The economy and underlying economic theory are unexamined in the context of social capital;
- The term offers a quick fix for economists to “explain” such things as differences in economic performance;
- Social capital is used so frequently it has moved from being used as a residual explanatory factor to become seen as a leading explanatory factor (see the section in IFLL on “Three capitals: a framework for understanding);
- The policy perspective induced by social capital offers the opportunity to improve the status quo without challenging it;
- Social capital decontextualises analyses of social situations and loses other components such as class and community resulting in a very fluid set of concepts employed in the literature;
- Social capital has been both a symptom of and exacerbates the problems identified in the integrity and funding of research in recent years;
- The literature on social capital has not addressed key criticisms of the term itself or its use in research;
- As a result of the above, the term has become definitionally chaotic. see pp2-5
"