ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how social capital is distributed among individuals in a society, how it is accessed, and how and to what extent it affects status attainment. This study defi nes social capital as resources accessed through one’s social networks. The cliché, “It’s not what you know but who you know that matters” prescribes social networks as a panacea for many things, from everyday problems to securing better jobs. The nature and effects of social capital have been extensively studied in the literature in which empirical evidence was initially drawn from community studies before being extended to national samples (Lin 1999; Lin and Dumin 1986; Lin, Ensel, and Vaughn 1981; Marsden and Hurlbert 1988; De Graaf and Flap 1988).
