Assessing the Role of Social capital in Public Administration Reform: The Case of Developing Housing Associations

Abstract

Some collectivities are more efficient than others in achieving common goals and one important factor that explains success is the capacity of their members to cooperate. Game theorists have studied this phenomenon under a variety of circumstances and shown that failure to cooperate for mutual benefit does not necessarily signal ignorance or irrationality. (Raub and Voss 1986) On the contrary, theory underpredicts co-operation and finds more actors who defect than empirical tests usually indicate. Recently, scholars in sociology, economics and political science have converged on the concept of social capital as a comprehensive explanation of why members of some communities cooperate and are able in that way to resolve collective problems while members of other communities choose to defect and their collective purposes are not attained.