Global Trend in the Evaluation of Social Capital: Impact of the Social (in Persian)

The economists and social scientists of the 20th century were very much concerned with the clarification of the observed differences among countries in terms of economic development. But even later, with the introduction of advanced analytical instruments, the above-mentioned task was not realized. Moreover, the professionals who were practically involved with the development projects came to this understanding that development projects have different destinies. Another important issue was that why the apparently similar countries follow different procedures in the management of public resources and organization of group activities. During the 60's, researchers and development professionals discovered the impact of the labor force quality and since then, the concept of human capital has been taken into consideration. The human capital concept, to some extent, could account for the economic growth causes and differences in the success of development projects. But in the 1980's, new conceptual instruments were introduced whose main focus were on the social relations features among individuals. The social capital concept which was introduced as one of these new instruments, soon gained popularity and acceptance. Its popularity was due to its potentiality of being used at the different social-economic living levels. During the last decade and due to an increase in the identification of domains that have been influenced by social capital, there have been more demands for the empirical examination of this concept. In other words, it seems that demand for the empirical examination of social capital is more than its supply. The complexity and multi-dimension features of social capital has led to the fact that the conceptualization of the concept should be further highlighted. This article attempts to first introduce some of the more well-known social capital evaluation models and to describe a new model which has been designed for social policy purposes through taking advantage of the social capital concept. Other new instruments that provide opportunities for the empirical examination of social capital through evaluation of social networks are also introduced.