The Missing Link of Works on Tradesmen: Social Capital

In this study, the importance of economic capital for the understanding of the tradesmen economic strategies is accepted. However, it is emphasized that the processes of production, growth and contraction are linked to the social capital of the tradesmen as well as their economic capital. Therefore, the weakness of the social capital emphasis in studies of tradesmen was described here as the “missing link”. The study consists of four main sections. In the first section, the central role of social capital in human relations is explained. It is stated that social actors may need cultural, human and social capital as well as economic capital for the desired psycho-social positions. In the second section, it is suggested that tradesmen can transform social capital into economic capital. In the third section, it is stated that tradesmenness have a unique structure with doctrines deriving from both capitalism and tradition. As a result, it is emphasized that tradesmen have a social capital reserve, which constitutes mostly traditional-informal networks. In the final section, the findings of the study conducted with 450 tradesmen in Konya were analyzed. Here, the networks within which the tradesmen interact, relations among themselves and trust indicators were examined. Finally, it is attempted to understand how they produced strategies in times of economic crisis and how they benefited from social capital for enacting these strategies. The main result of the study is that there is a relation between the social and economic capital of the tradesmen