14th Annual Conference in Political Economy,
“The Changing World Economy, and Today’s Imperialism”,
September 4-7, 2024 / Kadir Has Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Türkiye.
Call for Papers for Panels organized by the Social Capital Working Group
THEME: After 30 years of social capital research: Past, present, and future
Asimina Christoforou, Panteion University, Greece.
Luca Andriani, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
It has been 30 years since Robert Putnam published his seminal book Making Democracy Work, which initiated a spiral of theoretical and empirical studies on the concept of social capital and its impact in economic, political and social life. Putnam was interested in explaining the differential distribution of economic development across regions in Italy by exploring the historical and cultural differences of civic behaviour and social association.
In the past decades, social capital has been identified and measured in different ways, it has been employed to explain a variety of phenomena, and it has been a topic of heightened controversy. Still questions remain:
- What is social capital?
- How can it be measured?
- Does it create value for individuals and groups?
- Why and how does social capital emerge and evolve?
- Is social capital an asset for the powerful to reproduce structures of domination and inequality, or a capability of a community to mobilize social forces and promote social change and justice?
- How can it affect public policy and social welfare?
- How is it affected by recent changes in the global economy led by human biological technologies, artificial intelligence, non-carbon renewable energy technologies, and the shifts in the relationship between the Global North and the Global South?
- What can social capital do in response to challenges of multiple crises to overcome the vulnerability of communities and build their resilience?
We invite contributions that examine these questions. We also encourage contributions that generally address the topic of social capital. We welcome works that derive from various social science disciplines and use different units of analysis (individual, regional, country or cross-country level), methodologies and techniques (theoretical, empirical, qualitative and quantitative).
Please submit your proposal by February 1, 2024.
To submit a proposal, please use the “Submit proposal” button at https://iippe.org/, and carefully follow the instructions. You will need to select “Social Capital” from the list to submit a proposal to our sessions. As usual, submissions may be made as (a) proposals for individual papers (which IIPPE will group into panels), (b) proposals for panels, (c) proposals for streams of panels, or (d) proposals on activism. The electronic submission platform is open to accept your submissions.
For queries and suggestions, you may contact Asimina Christoforou, Coordinator of the Social Capital Working Group: a.christoforou@panteion.gr
