Key research papers on social capital

How the literature is organised

Social capital is a heavily used concept and a loose one. Three founding accounts define it differently. Coleman (1988), with 25,938 citations in the snapshot behind this page, introduces social capital as a conceptual tool for bridging two incompatible accounts of social action — the sociological one, in which the actor is shaped by norms and has no engine of action, and the economic one, in which the actor maximises utility alone. Putnam (1995), "Bowling Alone", makes it a property of communities and nations, drawing on his own twenty-year study of Italian regional governments to argue that traditions of civic engagement determine how well government works, and that American civic life had notably declined. Writing six years later, Lin (2001) brings the concept back to individuals and the resources their networks hold. Portes (1998) reviews the concept in Bourdieu, Loury and Coleman, distinguishes four sources of social capital and four negative consequences, and argues that recent extensions from an individual asset to a feature of communities and nations may jeopardise its heuristic value — the argument to read before you use the community-level version.

Two disciplines then adopted the idea. In management, Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) argue that social capital facilitates the creation of intellectual capital and that firms, being dense in it, have an advantage over markets in creating and sharing knowledge; Tsai and Ghoshal (1998) test the idea on intrafirm networks, and Adler and Kwon (2002) synthesise the sources, benefits, risks and contingencies across disciplines. In development economics, Knack and Keefer (1997) found trust and civic norms associated with economic performance across 29 market economies — but also found that membership in formal groups, which was Putnam's measure, was associated with neither trust nor better economic performance. That disagreement between measures is the single most useful thing to know before choosing one. Woolcock (1998) argues for the concept's place in development theory and policy.

Main debates

Is it an individual or a collective asset? Portes (1998) treats the move from the first to the second as the conceptual stretch that risks the concept's value, and Lin (2001) holds the individual line. Is it always good? Portes reviews four negative consequences alongside the positive functions, and Saz-Gil, Bretos and Díaz-Foncea (2021) build the "dark side" — absent trust, reciprocity and transparency — into their framework for cooperatives.

Can it be measured consistently? On the present evidence, no. Knack and Keefer (1997) found two common measures pointing in different directions. Hall et al. (2023), reviewing 26 papers on community resilience and social capital, report no common method for measuring either and make a standardised, validated approach their first recommendation. Chetty et al. (2022) find their three measures — connectedness, cohesiveness and civic engagement — vary substantially across areas and are not highly correlated with each other, and that only one of the three predicts economic mobility. Whichever measure you use, report it as a specific construct rather than as social capital in general.

Where recent work is heading

Publication volume has been roughly flat for a decade, between about 1,700 and 2,100 titles a year in the snapshot behind this page. The striking recent development is measurement at scale: Chetty et al. (2022) mapped economic connectedness, cohesiveness and civic engagement by ZIP code across the United States and released the statistics publicly, which makes them usable in a student project.

Elsewhere the concept is applied to crises. Bartscher et al. (2021) report that a one-standard-deviation increase in social capital was associated with 14% to 34% fewer COVID-19 cases per capita across seven European countries between mid-March and the end of June 2020. Carmen et al. (2022) meta-synthesise 187 studies on social capital and community resilience under climate change, and Ozanne et al. (2022) study organisational resilience in small firms. Recent reviews cover non-communicable disease among migrants and refugees (Tan et al., 2021), teacher professional learning (Demir, 2021), mental health in public health emergencies (Hall et al., 2023) and social capital, Black social mobility and health disparities (Gilbert et al., 2022).