Home Page > Web Sites > Web Sites on Social Capital > SOAS

IIPPE Working Group Social Capital

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London has established a working group on social capital within the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy. The aim of the working group is to develop a platform for the exchange of ideas and research that offer critical but constructive responses to recent literature on social capital. For the time-being, the working group's web site will serve to host papers that address these issues.

1. The intellectual history of social capital and its continuing dynamic and content.
2. Social capital and socioeconomic stratification –with social capital either being used to stratify at expense of, by ignoring, traditional categories such as class, race, gender, etc, or traditional categories are seen as depositories of social capital without reference to their wider significance.
3. Social capital and social theory – general degradation of scholarship around concepts deployed in social theory, trust, networks, etc
4. Social capital and disciplines – different presence and role of social capital in different fields of social science.
5. Social Capital, the World Bank and development.
6. Social capital and policy.
7. Social capital and regions, countries, and case studies.
8. Social capital and intellectual entrepreneurship (the social capital of social capital).
9. Offering of alternatives and refuting the false claim that social capital addresses what was not addressed before and those who do not take social capital seriously do not take non-economic social relations seriously.

Official web site

Please check the working group's official web site at SOAS for further details.

Papers

On the working group's web site it is possible to download several interesting papers addressing social capital from a critical perspective:

• Cyrus Bina and Chuck Davis (2008) "Contingent Labor and Omnipotent Capital: The Open Secret of Political Economy".
• Asimina Christoforou (2008) "Social Capital: A Path to a More Pluralistic Economics or
  Another Manifestation of Neoclassical Prominence?".
• Ben Fine, "Social Capital versus Social History".
• Ben Fine (2008) "Social Capital and Health: The World Bank through the Looking Glass after Deaton".
• Ben Fine, "Social Capital Goes to McDonald's".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^^^

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^^^