Social capital is a controversial concept, which is used in economics as a generic form of pro-sociality and a simple means to introduce the social context into mainstream approaches. However, the accepted view underestimates social conflict and does not properly characterise social capital as an asset. When considering these issues, a different face of social capital emerges, one that can be associated with closure and privilege maintenance. This paper studies how access to and the extraction of social network resources depend on the social structure. By analysing data from a survey that included a position and a resource generator, we find that for the case of Spanish society, people endowed with high levels of economic and human capital enjoy improved accessibility and networks with a high prevalence of instrumental relations. There is essential inequality in the endowment of social capital, which augments economic inequality. When inequality is socially embedded, traditional redistributive policies may have limited effectiveness.

中文翻译：

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不平等和个人的社会网络：社会资本的另一面

社会资本是一个有争议的概念，在经济学中被用作亲社会性的一般形式，也是将社会背景引入主流方法的简单手段。然而，公认的观点低估了社会冲突，并没有正确地将社会资本描述为一种资产。在考虑这些问题时，社会资本的另一面出现了，它可能与关闭和特权维护有关。本文研究了社会网络资源的获取和提取如何依赖于社会结构。通过分析包括职位和资源产生者在内的调查数据，我们发现，就西班牙社会而言，拥有高水平经济和人力资本的人享有更高的可及性和网络，工具关系的普及率很高。社会资本的禀赋存在本质上的不平等，这加剧了经济不平等。当不平等嵌入社会时，传统的再分配政策可能效果有限。