Dear colleagues, I need to point out that I'm not a sociologist and that I'm asking this question purely out of (academic) curiosity! I've just come across the notion that - according to Bourdieu - a person's social capital depends on the capital of the people he/she is connected with through their personal network. If this is the case, the social capital of one's peers should also count towards one's one own social capital. But since peers are connected to the person itself, this should lead to an ever-rising loop of everyone's capital - up to infinity - leading to an overflow effect. Of course, it's obvious that this is neither Bourdieu's original idea nor an accurate description of social reality. But I'm curious what you think about this point?
I guess that Joe Bloggs on the other side of the planet would have a very, very weak effect on my social capital. Thus, the answer to your question must depend on the strength of the flows of social capital to individuals: for some these flows might be considerable Amazonian flows of massive proportions (depending on their social location), whilst for others there would only be tiny streams, and fewer in quantity. Yes, we are all connected in an infinite flow of nodal network activity: but these flows differ in number, size, intensity and strength.
On another note, I argued many years ago that Bourdieu's notion of 'capital' is nothing of the sort. His idea of 'capital' opens his 'fields' up to all kinds of absurdities: human capital, social capital, knowledge capital, economic capital, semantic capital, network capital, emotional capital, well-being capital, informational capital, status capital, pet capital, cool capital (I made the last two up). You see what I mean. I have been collecting examples of silly forms of 'capital' for some years.
One of the frequent criticisms of "social capital" as a concept is that it seems to suggest it is a quantifiable form of value that a person can accumulate and invest in the manner that economic capital can.
I'd say it's not helpful to view social capital in that way. We don't really, as individuals, hold onto our own little pots of social capital. Rather social capital, if it can be said to 'exist' at all, exists as those connections we have with our peers and the institutions they are embedded in. It exists, primarily, as the potential to convert those connections into other forms of capital, such as economic capital, cultural capital, etc.
Because we are talking about social capital as social relations themselves, rather than an individually ascribed form of value that is generated/amplified by those relations, your point about individuals multiplying each others' social capital in infinite feedback loops doesn't really apply.
Dear Glenn Rikowski and dear Andrew Simon Gilbert, thank you for your helpful answers!
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