Social Capital an ego - centric or socio - centric concept ?

In this paper Social Capital is defined as the bundle of economic opportunities offered to the average economic agent. After analysing what are the advantages of such a definition and seeing what is meant by economic opportunities, we test our definition for capital-like characteristics. The core section of this paper shows how this definition (according to the level of the analysis chosen by the researcher) presents all the characteristics that can be found in either physical and/or human capital, with the only exception of the property of substitutability. After defining the concept of SC in contrast to physical and human capital, the last part of the paper tries to build a positive definition, pointing out how, being a bundle of economic opportunities, SC requires material resources, relational networks and the agents’ awareness in order to exist. As an end of this theoretical path the concluding remarks of the paper entail some considerations upon the nature of SC as we hare defining it in the paper.