In the last decades the theory of social capital became more and more important in the social sciences, in sociology, anthropology, political sciences, economics, and geography as well. It has been applied to a number of research areas, including health, occupational chances, and ethnic relations. Several hypotheses, which follow from the theory, are rather well established by now. However, a number of research questions remain to be answered and these refer in particular to noninstitutional contexts such as the local neighbourhood. For example, we do not know how macrosocial capital in neighbourhoods relates to microsocial capital in people’s networks.
These questions are inspired by empirical and theoretical research, which distinguishes between individual’s relations and social capital on the collective level. While the former is usually studied as the instrumental value of social relationships, the latter is more oŸen conceived as social cohesion, trust, or community relationships. Both have dišerent disciplinary roots. Bringing together these dišerent disciplinary views of social capital and how they work in the neighbourhood context is one goal of this special issue.
 

Call for papers

We invite original research articles on the role of social capital in urban neighbourhoods and related questions.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Do macrosocial capital in neighbourhoods and individual social capital in people’s network substitute each other or do they accumulate? Are they interdependent from each other or do neighbourhoods in which people have vital networks individually also provide social capital on the macrolevel for
others?
The dišfferences between urban and rural neighbourhoods with regard to networks and social capital seem to be large in some countries, such as, for example, the US, and small in others, such as, for example,e Netherlands.
How can we make sense of this? What is the role of facilities and infrastructure such as shops or parks, and what about conditions in adjacent neighbourhoods that might moderate the effšect of social capital on neighbourhood outcomes there is a collective-good aspect to social capital, how do people in neighbourhoods create and protect such collective goods? What is, for example, the ešffect of ethnic diversity? How much investment is necessary and how many free riders can a neighbourhood ašord while still being a community? Are there tipping points at which the system changes, for example, will collapse if there are too many free-riders or become a dense community if many people are investing in local collective goods?
How large should an area be, so that social capital ešects can be established in an optimal way? Is there an optimal time period of exposure to note its
effšects?
 

Editors

Lead Guest Editor
Henk Flap, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
h.ž[email protected]

Guest Editors
Beate Völker, ICS Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
[email protected]

Dietlind Stolle, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
[email protected]

Nan Lin, Duke University, Durham, USA
[email protected]

Manuscript Due: Friday 30 January 2015