Human Capital and Social Capital in the Creation of Political Participation in Switzerland

Dear Editor-in-Chief Social capital includes volume and quality of relations between human beings, which can facilitate cooperation between them. Based on numerous studies about development in the different world countries from 1988, it has been specified that social capital has an important role on development and progress of societies (1). For better understanding of social capital and its effects on society health, we start our discussion with a question: Why two societies that each of them have same demographic and economic situation, one of them has healthier population than other? Studies in different countries with same financial capital show that a progressive health care system can decrease all causes of death, improve health situation and save the costs (2–4). By coordinating and integrating different sections of health system (inter and between-sectoral), efforts for society health improvement bring better and more results and in this way a comprehensive model create for health care. Synergistic effect of cooperation between different parts can develop social capital and decrease inequity. Otherwise, for example, lack of health facilities in small cities and rural areas can increase immigration and marginalization in the big cities and endanger society health (2). Because of great gap in the health, education, workforce and people participation, inequity has expanded in the world (5). Two main measures to confront inequity are improving access to health care services in the poor regions and development of social solidarity. The results of different studies show that whatsoever the gap between poor and rich increases, citizens’ health worsen (6). This gap is because of individuals’ unequal access to skills not their income (7). Administration of health programs in the schools, offices, public places and so on can decrease the gap in the access to health services between poor and rich. Through development in the social and human capital, managers can deal with health challenges properly (8). Different definitions have been published for welfare but the important issue is that welfare is not only having economic capital but includes 3 other forms of capital: Social capital, natural capital and human capital. To build a healthy society, it is necessary to consider all capital levels namely social, natural, human and economic capital. - Social capital is like glue that consolidate the societies formal and informal. Citizens have equitable access to infrastructure resources for a better health. - Natural capital means having a high quality nature, healthy ecosystem, resources compatible with nature, nature protection and biodiversity. - Human capital means the people who are healthy, literate, skilled, innovative and creative. - Economic capital means access to appropriate level of welfare and prosperity (9). It is estimated that 20% of the world wealth is in the natural capital, 20% in the economic capital and remaining 60% is in the combination of social and human capital.

Career success is defined as the positive psychological or work-related achievements one obtains through work experiences. For individuals, career success reflects the self-actualization of individuals. In an organization, employees' personal career success means the organization's making the best of its human resources and eventually contributing to its success. As career success is of concern not only to individuals but also to organizations, many researchers continue to identify the individual and organizational factors that facilitate employees' career success. At the individual level, demographic, social capital, human capital, motivational and work-family variables are possibly associated with career success. At the organizational level, organizational variables such as firm size, industry sector, organizational support and geographic location may also be related to career success. Though Chinese organizational researchers have identified many determinants of career success and some have qualitatively reviewed partially the related literature, no large-scale systematic attempt has been made to systematically summarize the existent literature. In order to quantitatively review the career success literature, we use meta-analysis which is of appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, meta-analysis is a quantitative review technique that can reduce the measurement error from sampling and unreliability in individual studies. Secondly, a critical review and synthesis of the related body of research can play an important role in theory development and building. Thirdly, as former scholars have already identified some factors that determined objective and subjective career success, it would, therefore, be theoretically valuable to review and compare the strength of predictors in determining the objective and subjective career success in order to guide future research and management practices. In this study, we use meta-analysis to examine the relative importance of three career competencies(i.e., human capital, social capital, and psychological capital) and their underlying mechanism of predicting career success. Four inclusion criteria were used to select individual studies for this. Firstly, we focused on studies with dependent variables including at least one kind of operationalizations such as promotion, salary or subjective career success. Secondly, participants had to be employees in Mainland China. Thirdly, correlations were reported in the study. Fourthly, if the same sample was repeatedly included in different studies, then only the study that including most number of variables would be used in the present study. According to the above four criteria, we identified 76 studies that covered 78 dependent samples and 21,570 employees. Based on the intelligent career framework, contest and sponsored mobility, the theory of market transition, and the imbedding perspective of social capital, we put forward our hypotheses. To test our hypotheses, we obtained a correlation matrix first through four steps(i.e., encoding, correcting for correlations, composition of correlations and calculation of effective seizes). Then, we utilized LISREL8.30 to test our hypotheses. The results showed:(1) human capital, social capital and psychological capital were positively related to objective and subjective career success;(2) while human capital could explain more variance of objective career success, psychological capital could explain more variance of subjective career success;(3) organization sponsorship partially mediated the relationship between human capital, social capital and career success; it also partially mediated the relationship between psychological capital and subjective career success. The relationship between psychological capital and objective career success was fully mediated through organization sponsorship;(4) psychological capital could predict better much better organization sponsorship. This study contributes to the career success literature. One major contribution is that our results reveal the differential effects of the three career competency on objective and subjective career success. This finding isimportant both to theoretical development and to the methodology of measuring career success. Secondly, we examined the underling mechanism on how human, social and psychological capital may affect career success. Thirdly, it is important to find the kind of criteria used by elites and its agents to give candidates sponsorship. This theoretical question is examined in the present study using meta-analysis. Our study also offers implications for managerial practices. First, managers should focus on developing subordinates' human, social and psychological capital. Second, individuals should be aware of the fact that career success does not only affect human, social and psychological capital, but also others sponsorship. Several limitations have been noted in the current study. First, potential moderators may exist in the relationships among the three career competencies and career success. But we have not examined the moderating effects. A third limitation of this study is that we have not been able to explore the synergy among the three career competencies by examining their interactions due to the limitation of meta-analysis. Third, like other meta-analyses that examine mediating process, the current meta-analysis has not included control variables in hypotheses testing because many studies have not provided correlations with these control variables.

In this article we show that associational relationships and social norms of villages in rural Tanzania are both capital and social. After outlining the various concepts of social capital we tell how and why we created data on social capital using a large-scale household survey in rural Tanzania that was designed to query households about their social connections and attitudes. By using the Social Capital and Poverty Survey (SCPS) and data from a different survey, which also had information on incomes, we show that a village’s social capital has an effect on the incomes of the households in that village, an effect that is empirically large, definitely social, and plausibly causal. Finally, we use the two data sets to examine a number of proximate channels through which social capital appears to operate.

Reviewed by: Desigualdades Sociais, Redes de Sociabilidade e Participação Política (Social Inequalities, Sociability Networks, and Political Participation) Gláucio Ary Dillon Soares Desigualdades Sociais, Redes de Sociabilidade e Participação Política (Social Inequalities, Sociability etworks, and Political Participation) Author: Neuma Aguiar (ed.) Publisher: Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG (2007) Pages: 291 ISBN: 978-85-7041-610-0 Introduction In Brazil, the most recommended readings in graduate sociology courses are dominated by Europeans. Few Brazilians are among the most read. Also, conspicuously under-represented are North Americans. Of the seven top Europeans, five (Weber, Bourdieu, Marx, Foucault and Durkheim) are dead. A pernicious effect of the conceptual and theoretical alienation is that the Social Sciences do not provide answers to the major problems affecting Brazil—nor try to. The subjects taught are not related to those that the population expressed concerns. They are not grounded in time and space. Research methods, in general, and Statistics, in particular, are painfully absent from course syllabi, congresses, articles, books, theses and dissertations. Nelson do Valle Silva is one of the few who researched and criticized these serious lacunae. He analyzed 308 articles published in the Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais (RBCS): 85% had no quantification whatsoever; 13% had univariate frequency distributions and only 8 (eight) articles, less than 3%, had any kind of statistical analysis. Of the eight authors, only one was fully trained in Brazil. It is against this background of indifference, if not hostility, to quantitative sociology that Desigualdades Sociais, Redes de Sociabilidade e Participação Política should be read. It has an Introduction, eleven chapters and two appendixes. The contents are spread over different aspects of life in the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area. The book uses data from a survey. Sampling was multi-staging. The questionnaire has a considerable conceptual and theoretical spread. The Editor's focus was on inequality, stratification and mobility, with an eye on social capital, social networks and related concepts. It discusses the usefulness of keeping human, cultural and social capital separate, and underlines the consequences of these concepts for more classic concerns such as occupation and income. Race, gender, violence, crime and fears, as well as political participation, apathy and trust—central issues in Brazil today that are dealt with in some detail. A cursory inspection of the bibliography used in the various chapters reveals a far more balanced use of sources than the syllabi. The work of Brazilian and North-American social and political scientists is recognized, as is that of European researchers and thinkers, contemporary and "classic". However, references to researchers outside North America and Western Europe are scarce. Africa, Asia and other Latin American countries are absent. Chapter One The first chapter, by Antônio Augusto Pereira Prates, Flávio Alex de Oliveira Carvalhaes and Bráulio Figueiredo Alves Silva, deals with social capital and social networks. Joining Coleman, Granovetter and Burt, it makes a point of linking both and presents a balanced discussion. It cross-tabulates weak ties and social capital, expecting to find efficacy differentials among the resulting cells. They analyze an index of social capital. Age, in years, having 11 or more years of formal education and having lived for seven or more years in the neighborhood are the three surviving independent variables. Later they introduce "weak ties", measured by the presence in neighborhood meetings and in informal meetings with city officials, as an intervening variable. Access to ties enhances collective efficacy. Actually, only when weak ties are present does social capital influence efficacy. Chapter Two Jorge Alexandre Neves and Diogo Henrique Helal wrote the second chapter, retaining social capital and "associativismo" in their analysis of the labor market. They discuss two definitions of social capital, one that is an attribute of collectivities and another that may become an attribute of individuals and/or be used by them. They use Granovetter, Bourdieu and Portes to back the latter. They hypothesize that the greater the individual's social capital, the higher the likelihood that he/she will be employed even after controlling for SES (socioeconomic status) at birth and human capital. They use a multinomial logistic regression, based on the number of years of formal education, age...

The impact of social and human capital on the income attainment of Dutch managers

The literature has widely covered the factors that determine the success of entrepreneurial ventures from financial and organizational perspectives. This study intends to tackle how the Financial Capital, the Human Capital, the Social Capital, and the Psychological Capital of the Entrepreneur affect Entrepreneurial Success. Despite that the Financial, Human, and Social Capitals are extensively examined in the literature as they relate to entrepreneurial success, this paper will add the psychological capital of the entrepreneur and examine its effect on entrepreneurial success in Egypt.This study aimed to investigate the effect of Financial Capital, Human Capital, Social Capital, and Psychological Capital on Entrepreneurial Success using a cross-sectional survey. Respondents were the owners and founders of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Cairo, Egypt. The results revealed that Social Capital and Psychological capital had a statistical significance as well as a positive strong relationship with Entrepreneurial success, while the Financial Capital and the Human Capital had statistical insignificance as well as a positive weak to a very weak relationship with Entrepreneurial success respectively.The study findings suggested that entrepreneurial success is strongly connected to the intangible resources of the entrepreneur, which are Social Capital and Psychological Capital, and that the Psychological Capital had the highest impact on Entrepreneurial success. However, the impact of the Financial Capital and Human Capital on Entrepreneurial Success was statistically insignificant.

HUMAN capital. It's why our neighbors have good jobs; it's why the teenager down the block can invent a new technology to help deaf people communicate. It's why we're able to compete economically within and among our 50 states and with other nations. It's why novels are written and why history is documented. And human capital comes from education. The Well-Being of Nations: The Role of Human and Social Capital, a 2001 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, took the lead in examining this connection. (This report is available at www.oecd.org; search on the title.) It correlated human capital (the knowledge and skills derived from education, training, and experience) and national well-being (economic growth, better health, lower crime, political and community participation, and social cohesion). Evidence from the Census According to Educational Attainment: A 2000 Census Brief -- a U.S. Census Bureau report released in August 2003 and summarized in a new issue of Progress of Reform from the Education Commission of the States -- education levels in the United States are high and rising. In 2000, four out of five adults had completed high school (contrasted with just 24% of the population in 1940 and just over 50% in 1970), and more than half the U.S. population aged 25 and older had completed at least some college education. The six states with the lowest high school completion rates in 1990 (Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee) were, in 2000, among the states with the largest growth in the percentage of people aged 25 and older who had completed high school or more. However, it is possible that attainment may be leveling off. If one disaggregates the data by age group, it appears that younger generations are less educated than the generations they will succeed. Closing the College Participation Gap Although these data demonstrate that we've made strides in our development of human capital, a newly released report, Closing the College Participation Gap: A National Summary, looks at current conditions related to postsecondary access and participation. (This report and others in the same series are available at www.ecs.org.) Author Sandra Ruppert, who is program director of the Education Commission of the States' Center for Community College Policy, presents a sample of findings gleaned primarily from her analysis of 2000 census data: * The projected double-digit percentage growth in traditional college- age enrollments during the next decade has captured national attention. But the less-noticed story is that half of the states probably will see either little or no growth or even an actual decline in the numbers of students attending college. * It's not just about the kids anymore: adults now account for nearly half of all college enrollments. * Less than 38% of the 19-year-olds who had graduated from high school by 1999-2000 had enrolled in college by fall 2000. * Nearly 34 million people -- 12.4% of the U.S. population -- live below the poverty line. * One of every 10 teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 is considered a dropout -- neither a high school graduate nor currently enrolled in school. * More than 13 million foreign-born people legally entered the United States during the past decade, but just six states absorbed over half of the influx. * The aging of the baby boomers over the next decade will result in dramatic changes in the age structure of the U.S. population. The report notes that the percentage of adults aged 25 and older who have less than a high school credential is lowest in Alaska, where less than 12% have not completed high school or received a GED. The next- closest states, with rates between 12% and 13%, are Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The U.S. average is 19.6% -- or nearly one in five students without a high school credential. …

Human and social capital plays a significant role in the development of modern civil societies. When the structure and quality of the society deteriorates, one can observe concurrent social and human capital deficiency. In this work the author made an attempt to evaluate the causes, conditioning and the results of these penomena with emphasis placed on the psychological aspects of this deficiency within both types of capital. Such analyses are frequently not considered in sociological-economical studies. Therefore the diagnosis of the relationships between the socio-economic situation, the functioning of the society and the resources of human and social capital may be incomplete. In this work the author has examined the existence of two-sided relationships like feedback between the quality and the structure of the society and the resources of social and human capital. The deterioration of the functioning of society structures may be the cause as well as the result of deficiency within these capitals. The quality of human and social capital may be affected by psychobiological fac-tors connected with the general state of the society including personality features and structure in the individual and social aspect. doi:10.5200/sm-hs.2012.028

An entrepreneur's innovative work tends to benefit from the entrepreneur's human and social capital. The entrepreneur's human and social capital depend on the social context, specifically whether the entrepreneur is residing in the home country or in the diaspora. The dual embeddedness of migrants may have a reinforcing or a countervailing impact on the benefits of human and social capital for innovation. Using a sample of 3,593 Chinese entrepreneurs in China and 177 Chinese entrepreneurs residing abroad, we examine the benefits of human and social capital for innovation, comparing Chinese entrepreneurs in China with Chinese entrepreneurs in diaspora. We find that the level of education, entrepreneurial competencies and social capital varied between entrepreneurs in home country and diaspora. Of the social and human capitals considered in this study, we found that only the more specific entrepreneurial competencies showed different dynamics for innovation in the diaspora compared to the home country.

Trust or bust: Growth effects of knowledge, human and social capital revisited

There have been inconsistent results regarding the effect of bonding social capital (SC). Drawing upon SC theory and mobilization literature, this study not only explores whether horizontal and vertical forms of bonding SC predict political participation in different directions, but also assesses how they influence political participation through political interest. The mediation analysis of structural equation modeling is used to analyze a representative adult sample in Taiwan. The results show that vertical bonding SC is associated with the conventional and unconventional forms of political participation, while horizontal bonding SC is not. Vertical, rather than horizontal, bonding SC is positively related to political interest. This study identifies the relevance of political interest in mediating the association between vertical bonding SC and political participation. These results suggest that failure to distinguish between the two types of bonding SC may partially contribute to the inconsistency of prior results.

This study offers an empirical assessment of the sustainable livelihood components among rural households in South Sumatra, contributing original insights into how different livelihood capitals interact with household well-being. The research aims to analyze the vulnerability context, evaluate the sustainability level of various livelihood assets, and examine the relationship between livelihood capitals and outcomes. Using a quantitative approach within the sustainable livelihood framework, data were collected from households in two villages: mainland and coastal areas. The findings indicate that the overall livelihood sustainability of rural households in both locations falls within the medium category. Physical and natural capitals were the most dominant assets, while financial capital was at a moderate level, and social and human capitals were considerably underdeveloped. The low levels of education among respondents were closely linked to the limited accumulation of human and social capital. Further analysis revealed that certain livelihood assets, particularly social and natural capital, had a significant association with household health status, reflecting a tangible impact on livelihood outcomes. These findings underscore the need for targeted policy interventions that prioritize human capital development and community-based social strengthening to enhance overall livelihood sustainability in rural areas.

Numerous empirical research studies posit that social capital has a positive influence on peoples’ political participation. Studies conducted in developed western democracies have revealed that social capital strengthens democratic institutions by impacting both the quantity and quality of citizens’ political participation. However, in the developing democracies of Africa, the effects of social capital on political participation remain under-researched. This paper aims to empirically examine whether the interrelation between social capital and political participation holds true in the developing democracies of Africa. By operationalising the concept of social capital as membership in civic associations, this paper examines the influence of social capital on peoples’ voting participation in three Southern African countries, viz. Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. Using data from the sixth round of the Afrobarometer Survey, this study found that social capital was strongly linked to voting participation in these countries.

Abstract: This paper examines the relationships between employment status, social capital, and the participation of young people in different kinds of political activities such as contacting, consumer, and protest activities. We focus on the role of social capital for political participation, addressing three related questions: Do unemployed and employed youth display different levels of social capital and political participation? Does social capital favor the political participation of unemployed and employed youth? Is social capital more important for unemployed youth than for employed youth? To address these questions we compare long‐term unemployed youth to regularly employed youth using original survey data. Our analysis suggests that the employment status has only a limited impact on political participation, affecting only consumer actions. In contrast, the social capital resulting from associational involvement is positively correlated to political participation. However, rather than countering the effect of exclusion from the labor market, it plays a similar role for unemployed youth and employed youth.

Community empowerment is one of the solutions to overcome the problem of poverty in an area. Community empowerment can be carried out by utilizing local potential and developing aspects and social capital. Based on the theory of the poverty circle, several factors cause poverty, including income levels, education levels, and the amount of consumption. Ponorogo Regency is one of the top 10 food support districts in East Java, with progress in the agricultural sector capable of supporting regional food security. However, many underprivileged residents have a poverty rate 2022 of 9.32% of the total population. Based on these facts, this study aims to reveal the relationship between social capital, education level, and income level in Ponorogo Regency. This study uses multiple linear regression analysis with independent variables (Xn), including the level of public education (X1) and human capital (X2), as well as the dependent variable (Y), namely the level of welfare of the people of Ponorogo Regency. The analysis results show that in Ponorogo Regency, there is a correlation between social capital and the level of education and community welfare. The level of social welfare is influenced by education and human capital. The higher the education level and human capital, the higher the social welfare and social capital formed. The development of social capital in networks at the educational level of Ponorogo Regency is very closely related, especially to participation in the religious field. Likewise, the relationship with norms on social capital in which the community has no tendency for a certain level of education related to the desire to implement applicable norms. However, participation in traditional activities has a closer relationship only at the elementary to secondary education level. The analysis results also show that the people of Ponorogo Regency with any income level have a close relationship with all elements of social capital, namely trust, social networks, and norms. Low-income people are associated with an increase in social class.