In case it’s of interest to people considering doing academic work on social capital, I presented in Brisbane on Wednesday a bird’s eye summary of social capital scholarship in Australia (PDF).
I ended up concluding that some themes seem pretty well covered already:
- Economics and social capital
- Health and social capital
- Education/schools and social capital
- Rural Australia and social capital
- Social capital theory
- Left-wing politics and social capital
By contrast, other themes are surprisingly under-researched, especially:
- Regional case studies
- Organisational case studies
- Indigenous social capital
I also made some observations about the big questions in the field, especially what I think are the hard/easy and over-researched/under-researched topics.
Thanks for the notes. Social capital is something i’ve come across at times in reading the work of Fukuyama and Mark Latham, but could you recommend some other authors/works which could give a undergrad student an eye into the field.
Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” is a must-read. From an Australian perspective, I also have a social capital section of my website, http://www.andrewleigh.com