ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by providing a critique of those prevailing approaches to social capital that treat "social connectedness" as the key to a society's capacity to produce desired development outcomes. It goes on to revisit earlier debates regarding the social dimension of capital and re-examines structurally-located approaches of Coleman and Bourdieu, who were the first to reintroduce social capital into academic discussion. "Social capital" as a concept is potentially one of the most radical developments in recent social science because it promises to overturn conventional notions of socioeconomic development. The chapter aims to extract from the literature a more meaningful definition of social capital which, alongside compatible theoretical developments in recent literature on state capacity, will form the basis for an hypothesis that can be operationalized in Cuban case as a way of explaining the country's unusual health outcomes. The importance of social capital's contribution was the recognition that capital is in fact inseparable from social relations and social structures.
