By Ben Fine
Tracing the evolution of social capital on the grounds that his hugely acclaimed contribution of 2001 (Social Capital as opposed to Social Theory), Ben effective consolidates his place because the world's prime critic of the concept that. superb forcibly demonstrates how social capital has increased around the social sciences in simple terms via degrading the several disciplines and issues that it touches: a McDonaldisation of social idea. the increase and fall of social capital on the international financial institution is significantly defined as is social capital's growing to be presence in disciplines, resembling administration stories, and its relative absence in others, resembling social background. Writing with a pointy serious aspect, superb not just deconstructs the roller-coaster presence of social capital around the social sciences but in addition attracts out classes on how (and how no longer) to do learn.
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Additional info for Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly (Political Economy and Development)
Sample text
These, especially asymmetric information between buyers and sellers, are used to explain why markets might not work perfectly – fail to clear, fail to be efficient, even fail to exist. As a result, the non-economic or non-market, everything from guarantee schemes for second hand cars through custom, culture, institutions and the state, are explained as the non-market response to market imperfections – as opposed to Becker’s explanation of the non-market as if it were a perfectly working market, as for human capital, intra-family relations, crime, even drug addiction and cultural preferences by generation.
More specific aspects of such flawed reasoning will 30 theories of social capital be taken up in later chapters. But, more generally, just as societies are divided along the lines of socio-economic and sociocultural status, so the potential to form ‘social capital’, however it is defined, and the potential to use it or for it to have an effect, will be highly variable, mixed and shifting according to what might be taken to be more fundamental underlying determinants – whether you are young or old, educated or not, male or female, employed or unemployed, rich or poor, rural or urban, and so on.
From rational choice to mcdonaldisation 23 The point here is not so much to mock the notion that such objects of study should be taken seriously but to question whether social capital as such serves the purpose of furthering knowledge in these instances. And, in the bigger picture, when we have so many of these studies of less esoteric subject matter, what do they do to the substance of social capital itself as a concept deployed so freely across the social sciences and other disciplines? First, though, from reading across the literature, it is very easy to see how social capital has spread and grown.