198 Social Capital and the Food System: Some Evidences from Empirical Research
food system. The first strand of literature is related to the works of Putnam (1993) and
Fukuyama (1995) regarding the role of social capital in improving democracy and economic
development. These authors basically view social capital as a kind of impersonal and
generalized trust that reinforces social relationships, building up, along with other kinds of
social norms, those social networks constituting the structure of civil society (or as in a mirror
image social capital is described as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity).
According to this view, social capital fosters democracy and economic development by
facilitating social and economic exchanges (reducing monitoring and sanctioning cost) and
allowing dilemmas of collective action to be resolved (limiting free-riding and offering
cooperative-based solutions to collective action problems). According to this definition, social
capital is measured mainly through the dimensions of associability, trust and attention (Offe,
Fuchs, 2002). Indirectly related to this strand of literature on social capital are economic
theories (Bowles, 2004; Fher, Gachter, 2000; Fher Schmidt, 2001) that stress the role of
reciprocal behaviors, social preferences and social norms in solving organizational problems
associated with contract incompleteness and in explaining experimental results of bargaining
games.
The second strand of literature is related to works by Burt and Lin (Burt, 92, 97; Lin, 99, 01)
on social structure. Here social capital is defined as “resources embedded in a social structure
that are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive actions” (Lin, 2001, p.29), where the social
structure refers to relationships (that are the frame of a network) among social actors.
Accordingly, networks are themselves considered a form of social capital. Linkages with other
actors constitute the network of an actor, i.e. her social capital, whose value depends on (Burt,
1992, p.12) 1-the structure of the networks, 2- the resources contacts hold (whom the actor
reaches), and 3- the nature of relationships (how the actor reaches). Following this definition,
social capital is not necessarily associated with cooperative behavior and high level of trust,
but rather it nourishes competitive behavior based on the exploitation of information and
control opportunities offered to an actor by her endowment of social capital. Related to this
strand of literature is the theory of social exchange, and mainly the power-dependence theory
both in its strictly-structural (Cook, Emerson, 1978) and structural-strategic (Molm, 1997)
version.
Associated with these two general perspectives on social capital are different analytical tools
and research styles. The trust-perspective leans on descriptive and historical analysis and has
mainly been followed by scholars in politics and functional sociology. Network-perspective
makes use of analytical tools from social network analysis and theories of communication
networks and has been followed by structural sociologists and scholars in business and
management.
Figure 1 summarizes definitions and related bibliographic references of the two social capital
perspectives (Coleman, 1990). Note that between the trust and the network perspective lies
Coleman’s conceptualization that captures both the functional and the structural aspect of
social capital, resulting in a very general but also rigorous definition.