ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, one of the main intellectual endeavours of a significant number of social scientists was the attempt to address more rigorously the old idea that the mechanisms of economic life are not only governed by the exact laws uncovered by economic analyses, but they are also influenced by the wider social fabrics into which these laws are woven. In particular, this multidisciplinary reflection aimed to uncover the ‘capital’ value of ‘social’ relations, and the conceptual focus of this increasingly influential research stream is now more generally known by the name of ‘social capital’. Unsurprisingly, moreover, the initial attempts to conceptualize these immaterial aspects proved to be especially attractive for mainstream economists, who have always been somewhat intrigued by the existence of some ‘irrational’ or ‘informal’ aspects complementing their rational explanations of market mechanisms. With their crucial support, this search for a more precise definition of such ‘mysterious’ human aspects was enthusiastically underpinned by national governments, international institutions, and non-governmental organizations, and eventually adopted as a potentially innovative explanation for conditions of both ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’, and thus as a new conceptual basis for policy-making initiatives in many fields (Harriss and de Rienzo 1997).
