Social and Human Capital: The Search for Appropriate Technomethodology

This paper acknowledges the power of human capital as a concept but points to a number of question marks against it, notably in the appropriateness of the approaches to measuring it, and the scope of learning which it covers. These same queries are applied to the emerging notion of social capital and the different ways in which it has been interpreted. Given the diversity of interpretations which this reveals, I ask whether the concept of social capital has sufficient coherence to contribute to analytical and policy thinking, as human capital has. I conclude that although its robustness as a conventional tool of analysis may be in question, its utility as a heuristic device is potentially great, but also that we need to match measurement approaches carefully to its potential.

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