Abstract SOCIAL capital—broadly, social networks, the reciprocities that arise from them, and the value of these for achieving mutual goals—has become an influential concept in debating and understanding the modern world. It features in much scholarly discourse, across a variety of disciplines; it also rever berates through the politics of the centre-left, as well as in new thinking about international economic development and social renewal. An idea that draws attention to the importance of social relationships and values such as trust in shaping broader attitudes and behaviour is clearly highly attractive to many people.

1. Social capital: a review and critique 2. Civil society and democratic renewal 3. Social capital, the economy and education in historical perspective 4. Economic, social capital and the colonization of the social sciences 5. Socialising social capital: identity, the transition to work and economic development. 6. Social capital, innovation and competitiveness 7. Refugees and social capital theory: social capital and social integration 8. Social capital trumping class and cultural capital? Engagement with school among immigrant youth 9. Social capital, schools and exclusions 10. Social capital and health: contextualizing health promotion within local community networks 11. Local social capital: making it work on the ground 12. Social capital and associational life 13. Human capital, social capital and collective intelligence 14. Social capital and human capital revisited

Abstract IN this concluding chapter we address directly the relationship between human capital and social capital. In part this reflects the origins of the volume, which lie in our participation in the ‘Learning Society’ Research Programme, sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council in the late 1990s. The second, more contentious, reason is this: the later decades of the twentieth century saw a massive swing towards the view of human capital as the royal road to economic success and social cohesion. This was based on rather simplistic linear models, which imply that investing in education yields returns in the same way as investing in stocks or bonds, with measurable, tangible results. This view is being challenged by recognition that more complex processes are at work, with multiple interactions between different social forces, and with the possibility that not all learning is individually or socially beneficial in a straightforward, aggregate fashion. In particular, we cannot simply tot up the numbers of people achieving educational qualifications and assume that we are progressing-or not-towards a ‘Learning Society’.

If we accept the notion of a learning society, it seems logical to conclude that some social arrangements promote learning more than others. It also follows that different social arrangements are likely to promote different types of learning. Most attempts to explore the Learning Society, and identify the different factors which promote lifelong learning, have focused on either the prospects facing individuals (particularly ‘access factors’ associated with entry into learning programmes or the barriers which prevent entry) or on the fate of nations and other large organisations (here, the focus tends to be on policy issues or the impact of external change factors). Our work within the ESRC Learning Society Programme1, while accepting the importance of both individual and macro levels, focused on what might be called the meso-level of institutional environments and the belief systems of those who inhabit and shape them. In particular, our work was concerned to find out whether patterns of participation and achievement in organised learning were associated with those intermediate relationships, shared values and habits known to some sociologists as ‘social capital’ (Bourdieu, 1985; Putnam, 1993; Coleman, 1994; Riddell et al, 1999). This paper draws on a detailed empirical study of schools attainment and adult learning in Northern Ireland and Scotland. At the outset, in 1995, we asked whether there was less adult learning in Scotland and Northern Ireland than elsewhere in the United Kingdom (Field and Schuller, 1995). We noted that there seemed to be strong evidence in both societies of an apparent divergence between very high rates of attainment in initial education on the one hand, and reports of relatively low levels of participation by adults on the other.