TY - JOUR
T1 - New theory or new dogma? a tale of social capital and economic development from gujarat, India
AU - Gidwani, Vinay
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - The quest to discover the most robust predictors of economic development continues unabated. Social scientists have run the gamut, for instance, from demographic pressure to the degree of price distortion, and savings rate to the rate of technical innovation. Currently, the attention is on "social capital."Although empirical studies operationalize social capital in an almost be\vildering number of ways, the shared impulse of these studies, the article suggests, has been to parlay "culture" in a form sensible to economics and policy science: in terms of its capacity to generate economic returns. While there is a pressing need to recognize the discursivity (linguistic and social embeddedness) of economic categories, "culture" translated as "social capital" is a sorely inadequate formulation. Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic capital" is, theoretically and empirically, far more instructive. Employing primary and archival evidence, the article demonstrates how the pursuit of "symbolic capital" by the dominant Patel caste has produced an unexpected trajectory of agrarian change in the Matar subdistrict ofGujarat, India; and, in so doing, it indicates how the analysis of "social capital" could be revised.
AB - The quest to discover the most robust predictors of economic development continues unabated. Social scientists have run the gamut, for instance, from demographic pressure to the degree of price distortion, and savings rate to the rate of technical innovation. Currently, the attention is on "social capital."Although empirical studies operationalize social capital in an almost be\vildering number of ways, the shared impulse of these studies, the article suggests, has been to parlay "culture" in a form sensible to economics and policy science: in terms of its capacity to generate economic returns. While there is a pressing need to recognize the discursivity (linguistic and social embeddedness) of economic categories, "culture" translated as "social capital" is a sorely inadequate formulation. Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic capital" is, theoretically and empirically, far more instructive. Employing primary and archival evidence, the article demonstrates how the pursuit of "symbolic capital" by the dominant Patel caste has produced an unexpected trajectory of agrarian change in the Matar subdistrict ofGujarat, India; and, in so doing, it indicates how the analysis of "social capital" could be revised.
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U2 - 10.1177/002190960203700204
DO - 10.1177/002190960203700204
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33749221168
SN - 0021-9096
VL - 37
SP - 83
EP - 112
JO - Journal of Asian and African Studies
JF - Journal of Asian and African Studies
IS - 2
ER -