Linking Indigenous Social Capital to a Global Economy

Provided by Research Papers in Economics

LINKING INDIGENOUS SOCIAL CAPITAL TO A GLOBAL ECONOMY

David J. O'Brien & John L. Phillips

Department of Rural Sociology

University of Missouri-Columbia

Columbia, MO 65211 USA

Obriendj @missouri.edu

Valeri V. Patsiorkovski

Institute for Socio-Economic Studies of Population

Russian Academy of Sciences

32 Nakhimovsky Prospect

117218 Moscow, Russia

Introduction

Identifying ways to link exclusive forms of indigenous social capital to more inclusive
forms of social capital that integrate families, communities and nations into a global economy is
a core problem of our age. At one level, this can be seen as a need to find ways to connect
traditional forms of bonding social capital to new forms of bridging social capital.¹ At a deeper
level, this problem is a major challenge to the viability of liberal democratic political institutions,
both nationally and inter-nationally.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a general strategy for finding ways to facilitate the
development of linkages between the two types of social capital just noted. After a discussion of
the significance of these social capital development problems for the future of liberal democratic
institutions, we will outline a strategy that draws upon three basic elements. The first is the
counter-intuitive notion that understanding the problem of building new forms of bridging social
capital must start with the economist's assumption of the rational person who must receive
individual incentives to be induced to support collective action, be it bonding or bridging social

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