Under the Social Capital Umbrella. Definition and Measurement

Abstract

In the last two decades social capital has become one of the most analyzed and cited concepts in the social sciences. On the one hand it is a powerful idea, used to explain a very wide set of socioeconomic phenomena. On the other hand social capital is disputed and ambiguous: there are a number of different meanings because of different theoretical frameworks. This conceptual vagueness is reflected in a nebulous empirical application of the idea of social capital. This work critically discusses the most relevant definitions of social capital, exploring how different scholars understand social capital, which are its main dimensions and whether there is a unique latent variable, whether social capital is certainly benign, and what kind of measures should we use to estimate its level.