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Zwischen Kultur und Kalkül? Vertrauen und Sozialkapital im Kontext der neoinstitutionalistischen Wende
Author(s) -
Faust Jörg,
Marx Johannes
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
swiss political science review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.632
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1662-6370
pISSN - 1424-7755
DOI - 10.1002/j.1662-6370.2004.tb00347.x
Subject(s) - institutionalism , social capital , new institutionalism , institutional economics , sociology , capital (architecture) , order (exchange) , consistency (knowledge bases) , politics , positive economics , political science , social science , neoclassical economics , economics , law , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , finance , history
Trust and social capital work in social networks as informal institutions, favouring cooperation between the participants of such social interaction. However, the increasing use of both terms has been accompanied by vanishing conceptual and theoretical precision. In order to counterbalance this development this article tries to clarify some of the major puzzles connected with both terms. First, we embed trust and social capital within the institutionalist turn in political science. Second however, we demonstrate that trust and social capital have been modelled from at least two perspectives: sociological institutionalism and economic institutionalism. Furthermore, attempts of combining those approaches have lead to decreasing theoretical consistency. Finally, we propose that economic institutionalism is theoretically and empirically more fruitful to explain the creation and destruction of social capital.