Social Capital and Urban Governance: Adding a More Contextualized ‘Top‐down’ Perspective

William Maloney, Graham Smith and Gerry Stoker

Political Studies, 2000, vol. 48, issue 4, 802-820

Abstract: There is growing interest in the social sciences in the concept of social capital and the role it plays in facilitating collaborative and collective actions. Within political science, it is the work of Robert Putnam which has dominated social capital research. This paper argues that the ‘Putnam‐school’ approach is lacking in two main respects. First, the role played by public authorities in the creation of social capital is neglected. Second, the implications for governance cannot simply be read off from associational activity and ‘stocks’ of social capital. The concept of the political opportunity structure is offered and adapted to develop a framework for social capital analysis. Original empirical material from Birmingham is drawn upon and compared to earlier studies of the city in order to support and illustrate the arguments of the paper.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00284

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:polstu:v:48:y:2000:i:4:p:802-820

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0032-3217

Access Statistics for this article

Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith

More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().