The term ‘social capital’ is a way of conceptualising the intangible resource of community, shared values and trust upon which we draw in daily life. It has achieved considerable international currency in the social sciences through the very different work of Pierre Bourdieu in France and James Coleman and Robert Putnam in the United States and has been taken up within politics and sociology as a means of explaining the decline of social cohesion and community values in many western societies.
Social Capital is one of the first full overviews of the intense debate surrounding this subject. This clear and comprehensive introduction explains the theoretical underpinning of the subject, the empirical work that has been done to explore its operation, and the effect that it has had on policy making, particularly within such international governmental bodies as the World Bank and the European Commission.