(4)
One Thing or Many?
social capital that is found to be positively associated with ethnic peace in one region of Africa
or South Asia?
Social capital theory is relatively underdeveloped in terms of tracing the links between these
diverse usages. It helps, therefore, while examining the fungibility of social capital to refer also
to theories of collective action. Different schools of collective action thought are consulted in
Sections 3 through 6. Conclusions derived from this examination are brought together in Section
7. Very few analysts have investigated social capital simultaneously within multiple arenas. The
results of these investigations are also examined in Section 7.
Limited spillover across issue areas located at the same level of societal aggregation is the
strongest conclusion about fungibility that can be derived either from the social capital literature
or from the collective action literature. Fungibility between lower and higher levels of societal
aggregation is not supported to even this limited extent. Any stronger conclusion about social
capital being fungible across issue areas and levels is not maintainable given the evidence
presently at hand. The paper concludes with a plea for further investigating how different
notions of social capital variously employed to study outcomes and behaviors in different arenas
might be related (or unrelated) with each other. Only with the help of additional empirically-
based investigations can the prognosis for fungibility be further strengthened to any significant
extent.
Convention