Rethinking Social Capital Theory: Stasis and Change in Low-Income Communities
Laura Locker
The interest in the question of how social capital relates to economic and political
development has become something of a scholarly fixation in the last ten years. While the
concept has generated much debate, surprisingly few people have questioned the basic
proposition that social capital is the key to developing strong institutions, particularly in poor
communities. It is frequently argued that organizations must strive to harness whatever
“positive” social capital exists in the area in which they work and strengthen it in order to
bring about long-term changes. In this paper I argue something different. Namely, I propose
that the existence of social capital—defined here as an investment of resources in social
relationships with the expectation of a return to that investment—can be a barrier to collective
action and institutional change. In other words, the more individuals in a community invest in
social capital, the more they become inclined toward social, political, and economic
conservatism as a means of protecting their investments. Accordingly, I propose that it is only
through the destruction or obsolescence of preexisting social capital—through either
exogenous shocks or endogenous entrepreneurship—that meaningful change can be realized.
Just as Joseph Schumpeter (1947) argued for capitalism more generally, it seems that inherent
in social capital entrepreneurship is a drive toward “creative destruction.”
This argument only makes sense within the framework of a revised understanding of
the concept of social capital. Although some outstanding work has been conducted on the
subject of social capital (Baron, Field and Schuller, 2000; Bhattacharyya et al., 2004; Portes,
1998; Fine 2001; Lin 2001, and others), most research has been marked by an understanding
of the concept that is at once extraordinarily broad and yet, paradoxically, extremely narrow.
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Convention