WEBINAR: Social Capital and Social Learning

Researchers have shown that social capital facilitates communication between disparate parties. This improvement in the use of society’s knowledge is one form of “social learning”. I argue that social learning also takes place through social capital via indirect, emergent means. I propose four categories of social learning defined by two divides: (1) knowledge that is already known and simply transmitted to a new party vs. knowledge that is previously unknown and now discovered by an agent, (2) whether the process takes place emergently and implicitly vs. taking place intentionally and explicitly. I will illustrate the emergent, social capital-mediated social learning processes that take place during disaster recovery. Qualitative evidence from members of religious communities recovering from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy shows that social capital can mediate emergent social learning, enabling both discovery and transfer of knowledge about resource uses, including social capital.