ABSTRACT
How does social capital relate to cultural difference? Considering the importance of cross-cultural trade and economic relations, historically and now (cf. Griffin, 1996, 2000), one would expect this to be a salient issue, but it hardly figures in the literature. The conventional assumption is that social capital is culturally bounded. In most literature this is precisely taken as the strength (particularist loyalties, lower transaction costs, and so on) and the weakness of social capital (group exclusiveness). There are two major strands in the literature. In one, cultural difference fades into the background and informal social relations and group bonds are at the foreground; this is the course taken in the work of Coleman and Putnam. In the other strand, culture (usually reified as “ethnicity”) is both a resource and boundary of social capital; the latter terrain is the focus here. In a sense, this line of enquiry appears as an extended commentary on “ethnicity” as the pattern of a particular type of social relations, much of which is modelled in turn on the role of the Jews in commerce. This was the subject of classic studies in the field: Simmel’s essay on The Stranger and Sombart’s sequel study of The Jews in Modern Capitalism. An implication of these studies is that ethnic social capital is a pre-modern hangover in modern times.
