About the Author

Tristan Claridge
BA MNatResSt

Tristan Claridge completed a Masters thesis on social capital theory in 2004 at the University of Queensland. Although Tristan originally wanted to apply social capital theory to natural resource management outcomes in Australia, he found that the current understanding of social capital was not sufficiently conceptualised to allow this application. This site is the result of extensive investigation into social capital from various perspectives, sociology, political science, economics and psycology. Where the majority of authors on the subject seem to approach social capital from a uni-disciplinary point, Tristan has cross cut these disciplines in this study.

The most important finding in this study is the steps towards a new conceptualisation of social capital. Tristan feels that this process is far from complete and will require extensive broad investigation into the underlying processes - particularly the direction of causality involved in many of the determinants of social capital. It should be highlighted that Tristan does not feel that this conceptualisation of social capital is sufficiently rigorous to be applied and further work is still required by questioning academics.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any points of clarification or if you would like to discuss any issues.

Since completing the research featured on this site, Tristan has been involved in research into behaviour change, university teaching and runs a web development company. As of February 2010 Tristan is in the final stages of a PhD looking at the role of social setting in determining student behaviour and learning outcomes in higher education.

Tristan has been teaching environmental science courses at the University of the Sunshine Coast since 2004 on a part time basis, including lecturing, tutoring, course development and course coordination. Tristan has taught environmental ethics, sustainable development, geographic information systems, environmental planning, and contemporary Australia courses.

In late 2004 Tristan established Decompression, an Australian web development company with his partner Meg Claridge. Decompression has developed innovating and creative web systems that are used by some of Australia's top ranking websites. Tristan has also developed web systems for product management and ecommerce, conference systems including abstract submission and registration and an innovative content management system.

While Tristan has not actively researched in the field of social capital, he is still intently interested in the concept and its application. Tristan welcomes comments, questions and input into this website.