Subjects and Boundaries: Contesting Social Capital-Based Policies

摘要

The World Bank is prime among the organizations formulating and implementing economic policy around the world. In recent years it and others have placed great emphasis in its analysis of poverty and inequality on the concept of social capital. Social capital, inequality, and globalization are three concepts that interrelate, but they are contested as well. In combination, the three may have more than just heuristic value. They point to some important aspects of the process of globalization and the misgivings that some groups of people have about it. In particular, the combination of the three concepts―globalization, social capital, and inequality―point to the fact that how you analyze and judge currents in the economy of today depends crucially on how you understand individual behavior and its relation to different groups or communities. In this contribution we aim to bring out the contested nature of the concepts of globalization, social capital, and inequality. By introducing and developing the concept of "boundary," we better understand the relation between the individual and his or her community, which allows one to analyze globalization and its doings better than was hitherto the case. While others (most notably Fine 2001) have criticized the World Bank's use of the concept of social capital, we suggest steps to develop concepts that will also be relevant for policy purposes.