Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Social capital: the missing link?
3. Social capital in a multicultural society: the case of Canada
4. The different faces of social capital in NSW Australia
5. Studying civic culture ethnographically and what it tells us about social capital: communities in the West of Ireland
6. Traditional communities, caste and democracy: the Indian mystery
7. Religion and volunteering in the Netherlands
8. Volunteering and social capital: how trust and religion shape civic participation in the United States
9. 'Getting to trust': an analysis of the importance of institutions, families, personal experiences and group membership
10. Membership and democracy
11. The Everyday Maker: building political rather than social capital
12. 'Not for our kind of people': the sour-grapes phenomenon as a casual mechanism for political passivity
13. The social in social capital

About the Author

Paul Dekker, Eric M. Uslaner

Reviews

"[This book] brings together an international portfolio of research to explore the development and consequences of social capital in everyday life....The collective work is...a significant contribution to debates over social capital. It leads us toward more nuanced articulations of the concept, at the same time, it usefullly undermines the idea that social capital can be unproblematically viewed as some form of social elixir....It is a significant volume, both for its theoretical claims and for the range of methodological strategies its contributors employ."
-"VOLUNTAS, International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations