When is Social Capital Not Social Capital? Limits to Political and Economic Approaches.

This paper contributes to a better definition of social capital by illustrating boundaries to the concept, suggesting some situations that should lie outside a definition of social capital. This paper makes a distinction between the political approach (based on generalized trust or voluntary associations) and the economic approach (based on instrumental use of network resources) to social capital. After a theoretical discussion of these two approaches, examples are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Russia to illustrate a few instances when what is commonly referred to as social capital should not in fact represent social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]