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Local Social Capital and Regional Development

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Handbook of Regional Science

Abstract

In this chapter, we review the advances of recent decades in the field of local social capital research. We conceive of social capital as a multidimensional and ubiquitous concept. This “capital” may be embodied in people, firms, governments, and in civil society. It may be studied as a stock (networks) or flow (network transactions), and it may be good or bad in a normative sense. We review and take stock of the literature and trace out the role of social capital in regional development and its relations to national and regional institutions. We further discuss implications for empirical applications and how social capital is a context-dependent phenomenon that bedevils one-size-fits-all measurement. We conclude that data derived from different forms of social media provide a particularly fruitful avenue for the analysis of social capital and its effects in the twenty-first century.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully appreciate financial support from the research council FORMAS: grant, 2014, code 2014-5968-28390-32.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Hans Westlund

  2. Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Johan P. Larsson

Authors
  1. Hans Westlund
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  2. Johan P. Larsson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hans Westlund .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Manfred M. Fischer

  2. Free University Faculty of Economics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Nijkamp

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Westlund, H., Larsson, J.P. (2021). Local Social Capital and Regional Development. In: Fischer, M.M., Nijkamp, P. (eds) Handbook of Regional Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-60723-7_129

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