The use of social capital in teacher research: A trendy but blurry concept

There has been a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of teachers’ interactions for their professional development (e.g., Baker-Doyle and Yoon, 2020; Kyndt et al., 2016). Teachers’ professional development has increasingly been considered as a ‘socially embedded’ phenomenon. This brought the concept of social capital to the forefront of the teacher research domain. A multitude of studies have highlighted social capital as a resource for teachers’ learning (Daly et al., 2020), self-efficacy (Neugebauer et al., 2019), well-being and job satisfaction (Edinger and Edinger, 2018), support (Bristol and Shirrell, 2019), induction (März and Kelchtermans, 2020; Thomas et al., 2019), and turnover (Hopkins et al., 2019). But even though this increasing body of teacher research seems to build on the same fundamental concept of social capital, it is operationalized and interpreted in various ways. Scholars do not always explicate which conceptualization of social capital they are using and often mix different conceptualizations of social capital under the same ‘umbrella construct’. We argue that there is no such idea of an umbrella concept of ‘social capital’. Instead, two overarching conceptualizations of social capital exist, namely individual social capital and collective social capital. Individual social capital (also called network-based social capital; Bourdieu, 1980; Lin, 2001) represents a benefit for individuals that is embedded in social interactions . Collective social capital (also called civic capital; Paccagnella & Sestito, 2014; Putnam, 1994) represents a collective good shaped by the sum of individual behaviors and is rooted in the shared culture of a collectivity. As these conceptualizations of social capital are different, we emphasize that studies using social capital as a theoretical lens should clarify the concept as well as be consistent in the interpretation of the concept, from its definition to its methodological operationalization. Many papers build on a definition of individual social capital while operationalizing the social capital construct with theories and variables related also to the collective interpretations of social capital. The most common example of this mix is to present teachers' social capital as a combination of the trust climate of their school and the resources that teachers can access through professional interactions with peers (see further in the text for details). Such practices can be problematic as they may result in conceptual ambiguity (Son, 2020). Theoretically speaking, it makes the concept blurry, and methodologically speaking, it is problematic to measure one construct with measurement methods related to another construct. We first map the two different conceptualizations of social capital, namely individual social capital and collective social capital. Next, these conceptualizations are illustrated with well-known teacher research studies, followed by examples of studies in which individual and collective social capital are somehow mixed in such a way that although these studies build on individual social capital in their theoretical framework, the operationalization is a mix of both individual and collective social capital. Finally, we discuss the consequences of the use and the mix of these different conceptualizations in terms of measurement methods