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Generating Social Capital: Civil Society and Institutions in Comparative Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2005
Extract
Generating Social Capital: Civil Society and Institutions in Comparative Perspective, Marc Hooghe and Dietlind Stolle, eds., New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 256
The concept of “social capital” has become a popular buzzword. Like other authors, the contributors to this volume draw on Robert Putnam's well-known definition of social capital as “generalized trust, norms of reciprocity and networks” among individuals (2). Social capital is credited with providing a wide range of social benefits, including tolerance of diversity, economic growth, lower crime rates, better health and more responsive government. The grandiose claims made on behalf of social capital and the large amounts of money being poured into developing social capital in diverse social settings, as well as the fuzziness of the original concept, mean that careful analysis of the idea of social capital is badly needed.
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- BOOK REVIEWS
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 751 - 753
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- © 2004 Cambridge University Press
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