ABSTRACT
Interest in social networks and their potential benefi ts goes back to the origins of sociology and has recently fl ourished in discussions of “social capital” as the productive aspect of social networks. The “capital” metaphor is a stimulating one because it draws our attention to basic questions: what is useful (capital) about networks, how do people build useful networks, and what profi ts do they gain from them? At the same time, the social capital metaphor can seem maddening, because the answers to all these basic questions vary from one context to another. Every facet of networks is useful for some things, but useless or even harmful for others, depending on the setting under study. Again depending on the setting, access to social capital arises from different kinds of social location. This variability poses a formidable challenge for research and theoretical generalization. In this chapter, I illustrate one productive path for generalization: the application of the same theoretical arguments to two different contexts, using different operationalizations appropriate for each context.
