Browsing category
Social capital and related concepts have application and relevance to a wide range of topical issues and current events. This category explores how social capital is important for these issues and events.
Many people report feeling isolated and disconnected from what is happening in the organisation when they are remote workers. They are no longer immersed in the social environment of the workplace, they don’t get to experience and observe the regular office interactions, and the mechanisms that would normally shape and reshape social capital are missing […]
Abstract This article analyzes the importance of social capital in the emergence of local institutions and the contribution of these institutions to the governance of rural territories. By valuing useful links between people and favoring the formalization of these types of links, social capital facilitates the establishment of local ways of managing rural territories and […]
Since the end of the 1990s, at the request of the World Bank, four scientists – Christiaan Grootaert, Deepa Narayan, Veronica Nyhan Jones, and Michael Woolcock, developed six dimensions of social capital through research carried out in rural and urban areas in some developing countries. Based on these dimensions, they developed a questionnaire for measuring […]
Export Reference Download PDF Print “No human societies exist without social norms, that is, without normative standards of behavior that are enforced by informal social sanctions.” (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004: p63) Informal sanctions are actions in response to someone’s behaviour that may serve to discourage nonconformity or encourage conformity to a norm, rule, or law. […]
New Zealand’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been distinctly different to many developed countries that have been plagued by inaction, divisiveness, misinformation, blame and deflection. New Zealand has shown remarkable community cohesion and solidarity and has unified behind the shared goal of eliminating COVID-19 from the country. Post-truth politics creates a divided and fragmented […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented interruption to physical social interaction. A significant proportion of the world’s population is in some form of isolation or lockdown, with limited access to normal social activities. This has serious implications for social capital which is primarily built, maintained and realised by social interaction. Social capital is linked to […]
Why has COVID-19 become a pandemic? There are lots of other pathogens that have not become so prevalent. Why has this virus rapidly spread to people virtually everywhere on earth with little resistance? With all our resources, scientific understanding, and communication technologies how have we failed so emphatically? We have 21st century scientific understanding of […]
Social capitalism is any capitalist system that is structured with the ideology of liberty, equality, and justice. Instead of aiming to accumulate only economic forms of capital, it explicitly values all forms of capital, including social capital, human capital, and natural capital. Instead of maximising profit for the 1%, it involves profit maximisation for all […]
With the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, many people are now facing the prospect of various forms of social isolation in the immediate future. People are being encouraged to maintain physical distance from others to limit the spread of the virus. Some countries have implemented lockdowns that include banning public gatherings, cancelling […]
There are significant barriers to the effective adoption of technology to alleviate social isolation resulting from COVID-19 ‘social distancing’, particularly among those people who were already socially isolated. The barriers most cited in the literature on the use of technology to remedy social isolation are (i) lack of support and training to use technology, (ii) […]