Two concepts have dominated the social sciences over the past decade. In the lead is globalisation. Not far behind is social capital. One attempts to deal with contemporary realities at the international level; the other at national or lower levels. The two rarely meet. For, as has been frequently observed, in raising the virtues of civil society to pedestal status, social capital has studiously ignored questions of power, conflict, the ruling elite and the systemic imperatives of (contemporary) capitalism. Though fundamentally flawed as a concept and equally flexible as the global financial system that it takes as its metaphor, globalisation cannot be so indicted. 1 For globalisation seeks to address the nature of the world at the turn of the millennium, by grounding concepts in prevailing empirical realities, and unavoidably confronts issues of control and dissent. By contrast, social capital purports to reign over a domain that ranges, even for a single author and leading promoter of social capital, Robert Putnam (1993 and 2000), from twelfth century Italy to twentieth century United States. Concepts with such scope of ambition should be treated with caution if not contempt. At a more polemical level, in drawing comparison wit
