Una definición estructural de capital social.

This paper is a review of a definition of social capital that relates the topological structure of social networks, in which individuals are embedded, to the resources available to individuals in such networks. Social capital, as defined here, consists of a series of resources that individuals can obtain from the structure of social networks. Two of the most important resources are information flowing through networks and obligations of reciprocity which can come out of the mutual confidence between agents in the same network. Both aspects of social capital –information and reciprocity- are closely related to the structure of networks: firstly, the flow of information depends on certain structural configurations (brokerage) characterized by low path length; and, secondly, the obligations of reciprocity depend on other structural distributions (closure) characterized by high clustering coefficient.