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.

About the presenter:
Alexander W. Craig is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics at New York University through the Program on the Foundations of the Market Economy. He earned a BS in chemical biosciences and economics from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in economics from George Mason University. He is interested in how community ties and culture influence economic development, often using the disaster recovery context to reveal how social life and economic life shape one another in the development process. He is also interested in how this approach can inform discussions in political philosophy and ethics.

The webinar was on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, and was part of the regular webinar sessions held by the International Social Capital Association https://www.intsocialcapital.org/