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Article
Framing social capital for macro social work practice
Journal of Community Practice (2009)
  • J. Aguilar, University of Texas at Austin
  • Soma Sen, San Jose State University
Abstract

Social work is ideally suited to use social capital to understand societal ills and to conduct a more holistic exploration of power, privilege, and oppression that affects marginalized individuals and groups. To that end, we review how prominent theorists discuss social capital and offer guidance for community practitioners based on these conceptualizations. In opposition to purely micro-level theories of human behavior in the social environment that inadvertently separate micro and macro-level social work, social capital is particularly well suited to be employed at individual, family, community, and societal levels. Our position on the importance of social capital for social work practice is in congruence with social work perspective on the person-in-environment. Although we do not offer a social capital framework for community practice, we hope that our article informs community practitioners' understanding of the place and importance of social capital for communities.

Disciplines
Publication Date
2009
Publisher Statement
SJSU users: use the following link to login and access the article via SJSU databases
Citation Information
J. Aguilar and Soma Sen. "Framing social capital for macro social work practice" Journal of Community Practice Vol. 17 Iss. 4 (2009)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/soma_sen/4/