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Social Capital, Interpretation of

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Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management

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Human relationships; Membership of social groups; Networks; Personnel capital; Relational capital; Shared capital

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Social capital is an approach that considers the actions carried out by policymakers aimed at finding efficient, but not necessarily economic, solutions to social problems (Portes 1998).

Social capital differs from human and economic capital mainly in its tangibility. While human capital is based on education, training, and experience (Leitão and Pereira 2022), which are transformed into competencies, skills, and knowledge that entrepreneurial individuals possess (Gianesini et al. 2018) and that are recognized in the form of educational achievements, economic capital is measured in monetary terms.

The most insightful approaches to interpreting social capital have been proposed by James Coleman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Robert Putnam. The latter author’s approach is indebted to Coleman to some extent, while Bourdieu’s concept differs...

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Correspondence to João Leitão .

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Leitão, J., Nguyen, H.N. (2023). Social Capital, Interpretation of. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_835-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_835-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Business and ManagementReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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