Social Capital
A recent post by Ralph Jennings got me thinking about some of the differences between a society that works and one that doesn't. What is it that prevents corruption and dishonesty, as we conceive them in the West?
It all comes down to the concept of social capital - the idea that in a developed society there are expectations and social norms that make things work better. For example, if you buy something, you don't expect it to be broken - the financial transaction in the act of buying entails an unwritten social transaction - ie. an expectation that you're going to receive the thing you paid for.
It's an idea that also comes up in a book I've been reading, India Unbound by Gurcharan Das. I've lost the reference, but in it he asserts that in an environment when businessmen are able to assume from the start that their transactions will be free and fair, the economy can flourish. But if there are suspicions of any kind, it stagnates.
In China this idea has developed altogether differently to the Western conception - instead there's guanxi.
Here's a few relevant snippets from what Wikipedia has to say about it:
"Social capital "refers to the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other," according to Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and the concept's leading exponent (though not its originator). According to Putnam and his followers, social capital is a key component to building and maintaining democracy...
Nan Lin's concept of social capital has a more individualistic approach: "Investment in social relations with expected returns in the marketplace". This may subsume the concepts of some others such as Bourdieu, Coleman, Flap, Putnam and Eriksson as noted in Lin's book Social Capital (2001; Cambridge University Press).
Francis Fukuyama described social capital as the existence of a certain (i.e. specific) set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them..."
Catch my drift?
