Handbook of social capital: The troika of sociology, political science and economics

摘要

In 1993 the American political scientist Robert D. Putnam published a book on an administrative reform of the Italian regions. The book would probably have been unnoticed but for a few initiated, had it not been for the last chapter, in which he used the sociologist James Coleman's views on the concept of social capital, to interpret his results. The rest is, as often said, history. As shown in the chapter by Ostrom and Ahn in this book, the literature on social capital has shown a boom from the middle of the 1990s and onwards. However, the boom of social capital studies does not mean that there are no problems. On the contrary, there is no common definition of social capital.