Kapitał społeczny – podejścia definicyjne oraz ich miejsce w naukach społecznych
Social capital - the approach of definition and its place in the social sciences

Summary/Abstract: The article refers to the concept of social capital, which is in recent years very popular among researchers active in the field of social sciences. The author attempts to recapitulate the most popular definitional approaches to this concept, presenting the four most famous among them and putting them into two main groups, one of which is characterized by treating social capital as a specific category of resource owned by individuals in connection with their interactions with other people and communities. Second group of approaches recognize social capital as a kind of metaphor that allows to describe the formulation of a broader catalogue of social phenomena, located primarily in the sphere of cultural values and ethics. This approach shows at the same time a strong relationship with the way of understanding civil society arising of the tocquevillean tradition. In the last part of the paper an attempt was taken to formulate a synthetic definition of the term “social capital”, referring to previous efforts taken by international authors to formulate a compromise definition combining both of these groups of definitional approaches.

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