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18 take, Coleman cited the trustworthiness of social environment, which makes possible reciprocity exchanges; information channels; norms and effective sanctions; and “appropriable” social organizations , that is, associations established for a specific purpose (for example, a neighborhood block group established to fight crime) that can later be appropriated for broader uses (304–12). Following these contrasting definitions set forth by Bourdieu and Coleman, the empirical literature on social capital has been split according to those who treat the concept from a network perspective (à la Bourdieu) and those who define the concept from a social cohesion perspective (i.e., emphasizing the forms of social capital highlighted by Coleman such as trust, reciprocity exchanges, norms, and sanctions). Within the field of population health, the social cohesion school has been so far dominant—and has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to network-based definitions of social capital (Moore et al. 2005; Carpiano 2008).1 According to Carpiano (2008), Bourdieu’s network approach to social capital offers a couple of nuances that are not highlighted in the social cohesion-based approaches. First, by conceptualizing social capital as “the resources available through social networks,” the approach explicitly recognizes that inequalities can arise in between-individual and between-group access to social capital, since networks are not all the same—some networks are more powerful than others by virtue of the stocks of material and symbolic resources available to their members. Second, the network perspective opens the way to begin considering the negative Social capital has been hailed as one of the most popular exports from sociology into the field of population health. At the same time, the application of the concept to explain variations in population health has been greeted with spirited debate and controversy (Kawachi et al. 2004). The debates have ranged from the very definition of social capital—whether it ought to be understood as an individual-level attribute or as a property of the collective—to skepticism about the utility of applying the concept to the health field as a health promotion strategy (Pearce and Davey Smith 2003; Navarro 2004). As Szreter and Woolcock (2004) noted, social capital has become one of the “essentially contested concepts” in the social sciences, like class, race, and gender. Definitions of Social Capital In modern sociology, the origins of social capital are most closely identified with the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman. Bourdieu defined social capital as “the aggregate of actual or potential resources linked to possession of a durable network” (1986, 248). Coleman defined the concept via a more functionalist approach, as in: “Social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity, but a variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: They all consist of some aspect of social structure, and they facilitate certain actions of individuals who are within the structure” (1990, 302). As examples of the forms that social capital could 2 Social Capital and Health Ichiro Kawachi, Harvard School of Public Health Social Capital and Health 19 effects (the “dark side”) of social capital, which critics point out have tended to be neglected in the social cohesion literature. A further critical distinction in the literature lies between those who consider social capital a characteristic of individuals and those who treat social capital as a characteristic of the collective (such as residential neighborhoods or workplaces). Methodological individualists tend to view individual actors within a social structure as either possessing or lacking the ability to secure benefits by virtue of their membership in networks. For example, Nan Lin’s (2001) Position Generator is an example of a measurement approach to social capital that inquires about the individual’s ability to access resources through personal connections to others with valued occupational positions, such as lawyers, physicians, or bank managers. By contrast , the practice of treating social capital as a collective characteristic treats it as an extraindividual, contextual influence on health outcomes. This practice is in turn reflected by measurement approaches that emphasize the degree to which social cohesion exists within a group (or alternatively, if one hews to the network-based definition of social capital, by attempts to describe group characteristics through whole network analysis). As Coleman noted, the “social” aspect of social capital is aptly chosen because “as an attribute of the social structure in which a person is embedded, social capital is not the private property of any of the persons who benefit from it” (1990, 315). The main reason population health researchers tend to...

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