The divergences between Bourdieu’s and Coleman’s notions of social capital and their epistemological limits

Abstract

With the ongoing expansion of the uses of the concept of social capital, the literature critical on these uses has also grown. The principal references in the literature on social capital are Coleman’s and Bourdieu’s conceptual definitions, with a strong quantitative prominence of the former. Bourdieu’s definition of social capital is generally taken as a positive counterpoint, but it is merely allusive and does not go deeply into the theoretical and analytical implications. The principal objective of the present article is to demonstrate that one of the main problems in these criticisms revolving around the notion of social capital stems from its non-contextualized use, irrespective of its theoretical and epistemological bases. Such eclecticism can be very common in the social sciences, but in this specific case it is aggravated by the nominal coincidence of the notions originating in the work of Coleman and Bourdieu, which have different meanings.