ABSTRACT
The notion of social capital has shot to prominence, with a rise in five years from nowhere to a volley of survey articles and special journal issues. Books dedicated to case studies have been published, general volumes are in press and journals have provided for a number of edited collections. Last, but not least, late 1998 marked the opening of a dedicated website to the topic by the World Bank, https://worldbank.org/poverty/scapital. It is surely no accident that the rise of social capital and of the post-Washington consensus should so neatly coincide. For a number of reasons, social capital is the dream concept for the new consensus. First, it incorporates all of the results of the information-theoretic economics – it can be seen as the non-market response to market imperfections. Second, it allows the formal results of the new economics to be expressed in non-economic terms. Thus, social capital can be understood as institutions or as customs that are recognised to matter for development. Third, by the same token, economics can be open to interdisciplinary endeavour, and vice versa, for ‘capital’ is ‘social’. Fourth, all of this can be seen favourably from the perspective of non-economists – that they are ‘civilising’ the economists and being taken seriously by them. Last, social capital is such a chaotic and all-embracing notion, that it can mean whatever you want it to, thereby granting extraordinary analytical discretion and power to the hands of those who use it. Woolcock (1998), for example, points to seven or more different areas of application – economic development, (dys)functional families, performance in schooling, community life, (work) organisation, democracy and governance, and collective action.
