Il di-lemma capitale sociale

The vast scientific literary work on social capital (SC), that appeared in the last decade in Italy, has provided useful empirical material to work on, in order to formulate more convincing definitions for this concept. The lemma SC often comes up in the headlines, together with a variety of words that distinguish areas of interest or disciplinary sectors. The aim of this article was to make use of such association; to recover, through tools and statistical techniques, typical of the Correspondence Analysis on a Lexical Table, information on the recurrent use of lemmas in a specific disciplinary context, in order to build up vocabulary around the lemma Social Capital; and to identify the dimensions of the SC with a view to its next operational translation. The interpretation of these latent dimensions, together with the help of a grid, built around the difference the specific characteristics of form and those of context, have allowed the identification of specific types of CS. In this way according to the form we can distinguish a collective CS from an individual one and, accordig to the context, a territorial (local) SC from a civic one and a personal SC from a reticular one (the first two refer to the collective SC and the last two to the individual one). The analysis shows that each one finds a correspondent in different disciplinary fields. The taxonomy created has, than, been extended with the addition of a third form of SC, called relational, which has been identified in the reserve of suggestions present in literature and has not emerged from the semantic analysis of the lemmas, since it still hasn’t been spread.

Massimo Pendenza, Giuseppe Giordano, Il di-lemma capitale sociale in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL LAVORO " 102/2006, pp , DOI: