Social Capital Debate and Measurement Issue of Social Capital in Turkey

Social capital, which has become an important concept in social sciences and economics literature in recent years, has an increased use in studies on development, education, criminology. Particularly since 1990s, it showed sociologically based theoretical developments, it has presented a new technical language for the solution of problems in different disciplinary areas and is considered as a new approach in the economy- and development-oriented studies. Therefore, the concept has a feature that can be established ties in different fields of social sciences. However when the researchers examined the social capital, they present different definitions according to the issues at hand and the level of analysis they conduct their studies. This led to the emergence of vairous, and often conflicting definitions for the conception of social capital . For example, social capital in some studies are divided into internal and external social capital. Studies conducted in Turkey generally adopts an internal social capital approach while it is often not articulated clearly. However, the evaluation of Turkey s social capital based on internal social capital approach is low, whereas it could be considered higher considered according to external social capital approach. This difference reminds us that we have to discuss carefully the methods of study on social capital and to ask what it is constructed, who constructs it, and how it is constructed in these studies. At the same time, these double differences remind that the concepts are not part of an philosophical discourse in an empty space and that they needs to be understood on the basis of social, historical, local roots and realities. The basic point of this study is that dominant discourse and its recommendations for method, analysis and policy of Turkey s social capital is very one-sided and remains at a descriptive level, and that it makes invisible other aspects of the social reality. In this article, I firstly will present a general discussion on the methods and criteria used in these studies and points out their ambiguities. Secondly, I will discuss problems present in the researches on social capital in Turkey which used the criteria of World Bank from the quantitative and qualitative points of view. Finally I will argue that there are deficiencies of social scientific accounts of social capital in Turkey that take the presuppositions of classical economic development for granted, and that we have to take into account historical and social-cultural characteristics of each society in our researches on social capital in the non-European contexts.