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In Social Capital We Trust?

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Abstract

It has been widely postulated in the literature that social capital is positively related to or is the same as trust. The present study presents three theoretical perspectives regarding how individual and organizational social capital may be related to network trust and generalized trust: the compositional element (Putnam), functional equivalence (Fukuyama), and mutual independence (Lin). To each of these perspectives we allocated distinct measures of individual and organizational network mechanisms considering their operational definition of social capital. Using nationally representative data sets from the United States and China, we developed a comparative research design through which the three perspectives were put into an empirical test. In conclusion, we found that the compositional element perspective is most prone to cross-national contingencies, whereas the mutual independence perspective is freer from such contextual influences. In particular, the positive association between number of membership in voluntary associations (organizational social capital) and generalized trust exists only in the United States, whereas individual social capital based on network diversity and resources is unrelated to generalized trust in neither country. Lastly, the functional equivalence perspective does not get empirical support from the data, particularly with regard to the proposed negative relationship between network closure and generalized trust. These findings challenge the assumptions concerning the positive association or equivalence between social capital and trust in the literature.

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Funding

This work was supported by the NUS Global Asia Institute-JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Center grant [CARC-2016-001]. Data used in this article were drawn from the thematic research project “Social Capital: Its Origins and Consequences” sponsored by Academia Sinica, Taiwan, through its Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute of Sociology. The principal investigators of the project are Nan Lin, Yang-Chih Fu, and Chih-Jou Jay Chen.

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  1. Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, AS1 #04-24, 11 Arts Link, Singapore, 117573, Singapore

    Joonmo Son & Qiushi Feng

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  1. Joonmo Son
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  2. Qiushi Feng
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Correspondence to Joonmo Son.

Additional information

We appreciate the helpful comments of Professors Nan Lin and John Wilson, and the three anonymous reviewers.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6 and 7 and Fig. 1.

Table 5 Types of voluntary associations
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Table 6 Position generator in SC-USA and SC-China
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Table 7 Factor analysis of network diversity and resources
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Son, J., Feng, Q. In Social Capital We Trust?. Soc Indic Res 144, 167–189 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-2026-9

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