Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers

The notion of “capital” suggests a resource that can be accumulated and whose availability allows people to create value for themselves or others. People can do more when they have access to physical resources like buildings and tools, which are usually referred to as “physical capital”. Money, or “financial capital”, allows people to acquire many other kinds of resources. In the latter half of the 20th century, economists began to think about education as “human capital”. People who have more knowledge and skills can produce more, so it makes sense to think about spending on education as a form of investment rather than consumption [1]. Productive resources can reside not just in things and in people, but also in social relations among people [2, 3]. Following Coleman [2], I define “social capital” as productive resources that inhere in social relations. In order to give the concept greater specificity, analysts sometimes restrict the definition to particular kinds of social relations, such as networks of interpersonal communication, trust, and intimacy, or widespread social trust, or norms of reciprocity. Equating social capital with any particular pattern of social relations, however, would make it impossible to identify as social capital any new patterns of social relations.