Social capital: theoretical foundations and applications in community development and health

Social capital can be delineated as networks in tandem with shared norms, values and knowledge that aid collaboration within or among groups. It alludes to the resources accessible in and via individual and business networks. These resources comprise of conceptions, data, information, business prospects, power, capital and emotional support (OECD, 2016). Kritsotakis and Gamarnikow (2004) explain that social capital can be delineated as the summation of five characteristics. First is the existence of community networks, which encompasses human interrelation within a community through societies, groups and other networks. Secondly, there is civic engagement that includes the participation of individuals in the communal practices and the utilization of the aforementioned networks. A third feature is civic identity and it includes the feeling of equivalent participation within a community. The fourth feature is reciprocity as mutual assistance amongst members in a community, and lastly having trust and not dread (Kritsotakis and Gamarnikow, 2004).

According to Jordan et al. (2010) social capital has real and substantial impact in all walks of life. It has been argued that social capital instigates and fosters collaboration, team work, and coordination, which as a result has a wide range of micro and macro level results that are useful and valuable. Social capital plays an important role in community development. It functions as an important, fundamental constituent that determines healthy families and communities. Social capital is deemed to be a component in helping community activities. Having social capital within a community facilitates its development in the sense that it gives rise to coordination of people, organizations and community institutions as they work in tandem toward a mutual objective in a community. Social capital helps decision-making for the reason that members of communities do not necessitate any renegotiation every instance they get into a joint activity, as a result of projected or anticipated behavior (Tirmizi, 2005). In addition, social capital decreases ambiguity and obscurity between members of a group or community Social capital offers individual members or groups or communities with resources to disseminate the risk linked to development actions. Social capital also aids community development as it expedites coordination as a result of improved communication between group members or communities, therefore decreasing inefficiencies. What is more, social capital makes it permissible to have better sharing of physical and human capital between groups or communities, which in sequence aids productivity and decreases operation expenses (Tirmizi, 2005).

Social capital is also important for health education. Collective social capital links to the community development approach of health education. In particular, health education programs that build on and strengthen community development principles do not have the key goal of precluding a certain illness or promoting a particular health outcome (DiClemente et al., 2009). Instead, they build community capability to enhance the foundation for a prospering community. Social capital facilitating health education underlines the significance of generating settings in which people and communities end up being empowered as they augment their community competence or capacity to solve problems (Eriksson, 2011).

The contemporary emergence of the notion of social capital emanates from the past discussion in social science encompassing the correlation that exists between trust, social networks, and the advancement of present day industrial society. The theory of social capital has attained significance by means of the assimilation of classical sociological theory with the delineation of an intangible form of capital (Ferragina, 2010).

The direction that social capital is taking encompasses the individualism and communitarian approaches. Through the conception of social capital, researchers have brought forth a combination between the value that is encompassed in the approaches of both individualism and communitarianism. This is to expound on the aspect that social capital can not only be produced in a collective manner owing to the existence of communities and social networks, but it can also be employed by individuals and groups. This is in the sense that persons can make the most of social capital of the networks in which they belong to attain individual goals and objectives. In the same manner, groups can make the most of such social capital to carry out a particular set of principles or behaviors. Therefore, social capital is produced in a collective way but can also be employed by individuals (Ferragina, 2010).