Cogent Education (Jan 2021)
Social capital and education – An attempt to synthesize conceptualization arising from various theoretical origins
Abstract
The concept of social capital has become in recent decades one of the most powerful ideas in social science. Having its roots in sociology and economics, it has consistently “settled” in almost all fields that deal with human functioning—pedagogy, social work, social anthropology, history, health sciences. This multiplicity of approaches and uses stems, on the one hand, from the diversity of topics and issues to which the term “social capital” is applied. On the other hand, it is the result of different theoretical sources of social capital conceptualization. As a consequence, different researchers, when using the term “social capital”, have in mind slightly different elements of social reality. It has consequences in the educational research, and leads to a large number of studies using the category of social capital in relation to school, but their results do not seem to form a coherent picture, sometimes even leading to contradictory conclusions. The question arises whether it is possible to build a synthesized analytical perspective, using the notion of social capital in such a way as to make this category a really useful tool for analyzing educational reality. The paper is an attempt to present such perspective by development of two ideal types of the structural conditions for education (schooling). First, the author presents the understanding of social capital in regard to education in four theoretical contexts: James Coleman’s theory of exchange, Robert D. Putnam’s theory of civil society, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural structuralism and the network theory. Next, the text presents different analytical strategies resulting from the adoption of a given theoretical perspective. In the last part of the paper attempt was made to construct two ideal types of structural conditions for education, which seem to be possible to read from the results of research conducted with the use of different conceptualizations of social capital.
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