Trust and mutually beneficial exchanges: two distinct dimensions of social capital in post-communist societies

What issues arise in conceptualising and measuring social capital? What are the implications of designing proper instruments for the measurement of social capital in the context of transforming societies?

The authors point out that there are two major and significantly different approaches to the conceptualisation of social capital. The first approach defines social capital as an innate characteristic of social environment based on the high degree of interpersonal and institutional trust facilitating people’s cooperation. This approach prevails in "western" countries. The second approach to social capital prevails in the study of social change in post-communist societies where social capital drawing from interpersonal trust seems to be rather low. According to this approach social capital is defined in terms of mutually beneficial exchanges based on social connections and informal networks allowing individuals to achieve their own particular goals.

The paper contributes to the literature on conceptualization and measurement of social capital with a special emphasis on the role of social capital in post-communist societies in Eastern and Central Europe where it is assumed that social capital operates in specific historical and social circumstances.

The authors develop a measurement model for the two distinct dimensions of social capital, one defined primarily as trust and participation, and the other one as the capacity of an individual to participate in formal networks based on mutually beneficial exchanges. The model is then tested by confirmatory factor analysis. The analysis is performed on data from the Social Networks survey carried out in the Czech Republic in 2001 under the International Social Survey Programme.

Major findings are:

• the potential of the particular form of social capital stemming from generalised trust is rather weak in the post-communist countries
• by contrast, social capital which draws from informal networks and exchanges may actually hinder – at least temporarily – effective functioning of market mechanisms and, consequently, economic growth
• in transforming societies, it is important to develop such research strategies that take into consideration the particular socio-economic and historical context of these countries <\UL>

  The research findings implicitly call for more effort in conceptualizing social capital and for measurement of different variations of social capital both between and within societies.