Abstract

The concept of social capital has become in recent decades one of the most powerful ideas in social science. Having its roots in sociology and economics, it has consistently “settled” in almost all fields that deal with human functioning—pedagogy, social work, social anthropology, history, health sciences. This multiplicity of approaches and uses stems, on the one hand, from the diversity of topics and issues to which the term “social capital” is applied. On the other hand, it is the result of different theoretical sources of social capital conceptualization. As a consequence, different researchers, when using the term “social capital”, have in mind slightly different elements of social reality. It has consequences in the educational research, and leads to a large number of studies using the category of social capital in relation to school, but their results do not seem to form a coherent picture, sometimes even leading to contradictory conclusions. The question arises whether it is possible to build a synthesized analytical perspective, using the notion of social capital in such a way as to make this category a really useful tool for analyzing educational reality. The paper is an attempt to present such perspective by development of two ideal types of the structural conditions for education (schooling). First, the author presents the understanding of social capital in regard to education in four theoretical contexts: James Coleman’s theory of exchange, Robert D. Putnam’s theory of civil society, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural structuralism and the network theory. Next, the text presents different analytical strategies resulting from the adoption of a given theoretical perspective. In the last part of the paper attempt was made to construct two ideal types of structural conditions for education, which seem to be possible to read from the results of research conducted with the use of different conceptualizations of social capital.

摘要

近几十年来，社会资本的概念已成为社会科学中最有力的思想之一。它扎根于社会学和经济学，在涉及人类功能的几乎所有领域（教育学，社会工作，社会人类学，历史，卫生科学）始终“稳定”下来。一方面，这种方法和使用的多样性源于“社会资本”一词所适用的主题和问题的多样性。另一方面，这是社会资本概念化的不同理论来源的结果。结果，不同的研究人员在使用“社会资本”一词时，会想到社会现实的要素略有不同。它会对教育研究产生影响，并导致大量使用与学校有关的社会资本类别的研究，但是他们的结果似乎并没有形成连贯的图景，有时甚至得出矛盾的结论。问题是，是否有可能使用社会资本的概念来建立综合的分析视角，从而使这一类别成为分析教育现实的真正有用的工具。本文试图通过发展两种理想类型的教育（学校教育）结构条件来提出这种观点。首先，作者在四个理论背景下介绍了关于教育的社会资本理解：詹姆斯·科尔曼的交流理论，罗伯特·普特南的公民社会理论，皮埃尔·布迪厄的文化结构主义理论和网络理论。下一个，本文采用了从给定的理论角度得出的不同分析策略。在本文的最后一部分中，尝试构建两种理想的教育结构条件类型，这似乎可以从使用不同社会资本概念进行的研究结果中读取。