Social capital and social movements: creating and accessing resources through social structures

Social capital refers to the idea that aspects of social structure facilitate the production of, or provide access to resources used by individuals or collectivities to pursue goals. Conceptualized as networked access to resources of varying types, social capital plays a central role in the ability of less well-resourced collective actors to overcome prevailing patterns of resource inequality and redirect those resources toward the social change goals of a social movement. This chapter reviews various aspects of the social capital and social movement literatures, and discusses key unique and common challenges faced by both. In part, the presentation is organized around an analytical table that compares and contrasts social capital explanations in terms of different levels of analysis, different dimensions of social capital, different types of resources, and different types of outcomes.