Symbolic Capital - Distinction From Social Capital

Distinction From Social Capital

The concept of social capital was originally articulated by L. J. Hanifan in a 1916 journal article, The Rural School Community Center, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He included a chapter on the subject in his 1920 book, The Community Center. The term social capital was later used by Jane Jacobs in her influential writing on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Social capital was defined to explain the inherent value formed in neighborhood relationships which allowed members to cooperate and establish a communal sense of trust. Bourdieu, similarly, explains social capital as the degree to which actors are capable of subsisting together in social structures that are often heterogeneous in nature. Where symbolic capital is earned on an individual basis and may fluctuate widely between members in a community, social capital is the overarching sense of trust and cooperation that actors in an environment possess in between one another. An actor may possess a great degree of symbolic capital while isolating themselves from the community, resulting in a low level of social capital, or vice versa.