Private sector: using social capital in firms

Chapter 6 turned to the private sector and combined Bourdieuconomics with prisoner’s dilemma theory. It was demonstrated how private entrepreneurs convert – or do not convert – social capital into economic capital. Against this background, and combining sociology and microeconomics, we analyzed specific strings of capital conversion in time and space. We generally argued that people perpetually transform tangible and intangible forms of capital according to certain “laws of conversion.” More specifically, we focused on how private entrepreneurs actually behaved in everyday life. This was done by applying prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game theory to the empirical patterns from extensive in-depth interviews with private entrepreneurs in Denmark. The four Danish cases illustrated cooperation versus defection outcomes in the PD matrix. The first three games were successful win–win games. The fourth game ended up in a “conversion failure,” which landed the entrepreneur in the “wrong” PD quadrant. Overall, it is observed how entrepreneurs often succeed in actually capitalizing on beneficial bridging and bonding social capital in a Scandinavian welfare state like Denmark.