Commentary: Reconciling the three accounts of social capital

Abstract

The subject matter of social capital tends to arouse passions. After years of debate that often generated more heat than light, Szreter and Woolcock¹ have come up with a conceptual framework for examining social capital and health which promises to reconcile the opposing camps. They identify three existing accounts of social capital as it relates to population health, which they refer to respectively as the ‘social support’ perspective, the ‘inequality’ thesis, and the ‘political economy’ approach. As noted by Szreter and Woolcock, an often polarized debate has taken place within public heath between proponents of the ‘inequality’ thesis and the ‘political economy’ approach, with the former group additionally tending to emphasize the ‘psychosocial’ interpretation of the mechanism linking social capital to health,² as opposed to the ‘neo-material’ interpretation favoured by the latter group.³ We have argued elsewhere⁴ that the ‘debate’ between the psychosocial and neo-material positions poses an unnecessary distraction. We concur with Szreter and Woolcock's view that in the absence of compelling empirical evidence to distinguish between them, ‘it would seem most sensible to assume that both viewpoints could be valid.’¹