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and shared values and to networks of interpersonal relations. While in the former case studies
about conventions and collective attribution of meanings it was useful to study how social
capital can be a capital for society, in the latter, one of the basic issues that needs to be studied
is how it can happen that networks of relations can be built, how they develop, and how they
can both influence individual behaviours and be considered as an individual capital.
We also would like to reiterate that social capital is an ambiguous concept. By 'social',
a lot of scholars in fact mean 'collective', some richness, an advantage for the collective;
something that favors cooperation, and so on. On the contrary, we assume here (as a first step)
an individualistic perspective, considering the advantages of the trusted agent (deriving from
his relationships with other agents), not the advantages for the collective, and distinguishing
between 'relational capital' (Granovetter, 1973) and the more ambiguous and extended notion
of 'social capital'. The individual (or organization) Y could use his capital of trust, for non-
social or even anti-social purposes.
In economic literature the term 'capital' refers to a commodity itself used in the production
of other goods and services: it is, then, seen as a man-made input created to permit increased
production in the future. The adjective 'social' is instead used to claim that a particular
capital not only exists in social relationships but also consists in some kind of relationship
between economical subjects. It is clear that for the capital goods metaphor to be useful, the
transformative ability of social relationships to become a capital must be taken seriously. This
means that we need to find out what is the competitive advantage not simply of being part of
a network, but more precisely of being trusted in that network .
In the other chapters in this topic, the additional value of trusting is shown to be as a
crucial argument in decision making and in particular in the choice of relying on somebody
else for achieving specific goals included in the plans of the agents. Trust is analyzed as a
valuation of the other and the expectations of him, and it is shown how these characteristics and
mechanisms, being part of the decision process at the cognitive level, represent an advantage
for society in terms of realizing cooperation among its actors and for the trustor in terms of
efficiency of choices of delegation and reliance (Castelfranchi and Falcone, 1998).
Changing the point of view, we now want to focus on the trusted agent (the trustee). However,
to account for this it is necessary to rethink the whole theory of negotiation power based on
dependence ((Castelfranchi and Conte, 1996), (Sichman et al. , 1994), (Castelfranchi et al. ,
1992), (Conte and Castelfranchi, 1996)).
Trying to build a theory of dependence including trust does not mean basing the theory of
social capital on dependence, but to admit that the existing theory of dependence network and
the consequent theory of social power is not enough without the consideration of trust. What
we need, then, is a comprehensive theory of trust from the point of view of the trusted agent,
in order to find out the elements that, once added to the theory of dependence, can explain the
individual social power in a network , on the one hand, and, only in a second phase, the social
capital meant as a capital for the society . 2
2 The advantage for a given community, group, organization or society of a diffuse trust atmosphere, of reciprocal
trust attitudes and links in the social network, where (ideally) everybody trusts everybody (see Chapter 6), and trust is
not monopolized by a few individuals who take advantage of that to seize negotiation power. This 'collective' meaning
is mainly focused on the (quite confused) notion of 'trust capital', see http://www.socialcapitalgateway.org/eng-
finland2007.html
 
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