Youth and Social Capital

An interesting study that demonstrates how young people are developing their social networks in the internet age.

At the "youth research" strand of the World Congress of Sociology in South Africa last year, there was a disproportionate number of papers preoccupied with some concept of "capital". But we seem to have come a long way from how Karl Marx originally formulated the term.

There was Pierre Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital and a broader concern with human capital (primarily educational qualifications). More recently, there have been assertions around social capital, building on Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone and his subsequent work. And even identity capital, a notion pioneered by Jim Cote and which he has applied to highlight the need for "education for choice" to help young people negotiate increasingly individualised life courses in late modern society.