ABSTRACT
Within the last few years, we have witnessed the rapid appearance of the concept of social capital in public health discourse. Before 1995, there was only one reference to the term ‘social capital’ in the Medline database and that was in regard to so-called ‘family social capital’ and its effect on educational and occupational aspirations (Marjoribanks 1999). Though the basic ideas encapsulated in the current use of social capital can be traced to the origins of classical sociology and political science, the appearance of the term itself in the mid-1990s was largely stimulated by Robert Putnam’s work on civic participation and its effect on local governance (Putnam et al. 1993). He popularised this thesis by discussing the decline of social capital using the metaphor that America was ‘Bowling alone’ (Putnam 1995a) – a powerful image that propelled Putnam to an audience with President Clinton to discuss the fraying of the social fabric in America. Since then, the concept of social capital has also appeared in other fields, such as sociology (Portes 1998) and development economics (Grootaert 1997; Ostrom 1999). In these fields, there has been a good deal of debate about the definition, operationalisation, and the theoretical and practical utility of the concept for improving human welfare, especially in regard to alleviating poverty and stimulating economic growth in less industrialised countries (Collier 1998; Knack and Keefer 1997). Despite all this activity, one of the leading scholars in this field, Michael Woolcock, has argued that the concept of social capital ‘risks trying to explain too much with too little’ (Woolcock 1998: 155).
