What's ‘Social’ about ‘Social Capital’?

Abstract

Debates around the concept of social capital are often also debates about the level at which social capital can be abstracted for analytical use. Yet while many theorists and commentators involved in these debates implicitly discuss the issue of abstraction it is rarely done explicitly. In this article I attempt to overcome this missing link in the social capital literature by theoretically examining the ‘social’ in ‘social capital’ through interconnected levels of abstraction. In particular, and at a high level of abstraction, I argue that social capital is underpinned by a contradictory relationship associated with what I term as ‘isolated reciprocity’. At lower levels of abstraction I show how isolated reciprocity poses problems for the establishment of ‘good’ social capital in the UK.