If you were tasked with increasing social capital as much as possible, what would you do? What would that look like? How can you ensure it is positive and as good as possible? If we intervene to build social capital, how can we be confident it will improve?
Conventional wisdom suggests we can build and strengthen networks, we can create new groups or organisations or strengthen existing groups, try to positively influence norms, and facilitate improved shared understandings by encouraging communication. Is that all we can do? Such an approach may have some positive impacts but seems somewhat haphazard. It will likely improve social capital, but what if the goal is not merely to make it a little better but to maximise it as much as possible.
In many aspects of human endeavour, we optimise to the nth degree, but with social capital, most people barely know how to improve it, and we have little idea how to maximise it, much less the notion to do so. It can be useful to consider the limits of social capital since this helps us to focus on what builds or improves social capital and, therefore, can inform interventions.
For some aspects of social capital, more is not always better. Some aspects of social capital may exist in equilibrium. And some aspects may have diminishing benefits or even become negative at high levels. This would suggest that social capital has a maximum, although not an absolute or tangible maximum. It suggests social capital is constrained and ultimately limited by various factors and processes. Examining what factors may ultimately limit social capital can inform our attempts to build social capital.
In this webinar, I will propose a new line of inquiry that aims to link interdisciplinary understandings to improve our understanding of social capital and how to build or improve it in any context.
The webinar was on Friday, May 27, 2022, and was part of the regular webinar sessions held by the International Social Capital Association https://www.intsocialcapital.org/ as part of the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/intsocialcapital and LinkedIn group https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13975650/
0 Comments