Social Capital Webinars by Tristan Claridge • Institute for Social Capital

Free Social Capital Webinars by Tristan Claridge

Over the last few years, Tristan Claridge has given several informative webinars on social capital. You can watch these webinars for free on YouTube. The details are listed below with links to the videos.

Introduction to Social Capital for Researchers 2023

Webinar held on Thursday, August 23, 2023

This session provides a foundation for understanding what social capital is, where it comes from, and what it does as well as some of the challenges of reading the literature and conducting research on social capital. The session is designed to kick-start your social capital research or to help you with your existing research. The session gives you a blueprint for understanding the different meanings of social capital and how to navigate the literature on social capital. It is designed to give you a rapid introduction to the concept of social capital and its use in research, helping you avoid weeks or even months of reading.

Exploring the outcomes of social capital

Webinar held on Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Social capital has been described by some authors as lubricating the fabric of society and allowing modern economies to function efficiently (Fukuyama 2001). It is claimed that our society, economy, institutions, and political system could not exist without social capital; it is a glue that holds society and institutions together and lubricates their function. However, social capital remains an elusive concept, difficult to define, involving uncertain processes, and yet charged with important outcomes. The academic literature is typically vague about what it is, what it does, and the mechanisms that produce the claimed outcomes.

Introduction to Social Capital for Researchers 2022

Webinar held on Thursday, August 18, 2022

Social capital limits: can social capital be continually improved?

Webinar held on Friday, May 27, 2022

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? 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.

Exploring the theoretical foundations and meaning of social capital

Webinar held on Friday, April 8, 2022

This webinar will explore the differences between the main conceptual approaches to social capital and their theoretical foundations. Social capital has a variety of different meanings, and this tends to create confusion, with the same term meaning different things. Several authors have attempted to categorise the different conceptual approaches, such as the network, normative, and resource approaches. This is helpful; however, the approach adopted by any specific research project often does not fit neatly into these categories, and it is not clear how different aspects of different approaches relate to each other.

The wicked problems of social capital theory

Webinar held on Friday, March 31, 2021

In this webinar Tristan Claridge discusses the several nagging tensions and incongruences associated with the concept of social capital that are typically ignored but are impossible to escape and, it seems, to resolve. Critics are quick to point to these problems but the growing body of literature on social capital seems immune to criticism. Is it useful to frame these issues as “wicked problems”? This session discusses which problems associated with the concept of social capital should be considered “wicked” and how these problems can best be resolved or mitigated.

Social capital: the popularity and need for the concept of social capital

Webinar held on Friday, February 5, 2021

In this webinar, Tristan Claridge discusses whether the concept of social capital can be a transformative tool, or whether it reinforces the problems we hope it will address. The term “social capital” was used sporadically through the 20th century but it was not until the 1990s that it rapidly started to spread across the social sciences, into the physical sciences and virtually every area of academic enquiry. It has been adopted outside of academia; in politics, business, and international development, to name a few.

Social capital dimensions at different levels of analysis

Webinar held on Friday, November 27, 2020

This webinar explores the dimensions of social capital at different levels of analysis. In recent years there has been some agreement in the literature that social capital relates to networks, trust and norms. Despite extremely diverse views, there has been a coalescing of agreement around these three components with most definitions including some form of all three. These components are often articulated more rigorously with the terminology structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions. However, there is still little understanding of how these dimensions relate to different levels of analysis.

Social capital - is there an accepted definition in 2020?

Webinar held on Friday, November 13, 2020

This webinar reports on a review of 250 peer-reviewed journal articles on social capital that explores whether an accepted definition is emerging in the literature as well as the different conceptual and methodological approaches to social capital research.

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