Social Capital, Karl Polanyi, and American Social and Institutional Economics

Over the past decade there has been a surge of literature on so-called "social capital" (SK). It is unfortunate that the term social capital has been selected to describe the rich, complex set of social networks under investigation (Robison et al.). Though we have doubts about the terminology, we agree with L. J. Robison et al. that the term is firmlyestablished and here to stay. This misnomer may explain why the parallel literature of social economics has been neglected in the popular discussion of SK. There have been fledgling attempts to synthesize works, but it is still underdeveloped. The contributions of the Karl Polanyi group are rarely formally recognized. Further, the long-standing interest in the placement of the economy within society as represented by the work of the Association of Social Economics (ASE) and the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) is neglected. The authors hope that this paper will be part of, or initiate, an effort to examine explicitly these relationships and, in so doing, to increase the visibility of the work of the Polanyi, ASE, and AFEE groups by linking them to current SK discourse. The authors wish to emphasize that there is no intent to disparage current SK literature because it neglects the writings of social and institutional economists. Although we would like to see more attention to this economic literature, even that is not the major concern. The major concern is that pooling the intellectual efforts of the various groups may be beneficial to the examination of the complex issues involved in "SK."