If the capital metaphor is to be taken seriously, social capital must focus on sources and not consequences. Human motive is the equivalent of physical capital goods which can perform transformative functions such as creating utility for one person out of the consumption of another and solving...

When the first economics departments were proposed at Cambridge and Oxford, the proponents thought acceptance would be improved if economics could be seen as incorporating the methods of physics. The enterprise was premised on the existence of economic laws that describe invariant relationships...

Heterodox scholarship at Michigan State University (MSU) was influenced by the institutional economics of John R. Commons at Wisconsin. But it was far from monolithic and had many other sources and originality of its own. A case can be made that the center of institutional economics moved across...

Social capital in the past two decades has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the various social science disciplines. However, its adoption by the different social science disciplines has led to multiple and often conflicting definitions of social capital. Some differences in the definition of...

Introduction The purposes of this paper are: (1) to introduce the social capital paradigm; (2) to present evidence that social capital has an important role in poverty reduction; and (3) to suggest several policy prescriptions for building and using social capital to reduce poverty. The social...

Experiments and studies were conducted to investigate the role of social capital. Social capital (relationship to others) is a productive asset which is a substitute for and complement to other productive assets. The productivity of social capital leads to the expectation that firms and...