Organizational Social Capital and Religious Institutions

ABSTRACT In the past thirty years, a large and growing body of research in a construct called social capital has developed. Social capital scholarship has focused on three distinct levels of analysis: individual, organizational, and societal. Recent scholarship on organizational social capital has sought to explain differences in organizational-level outcomes; such scholarship might have broad applicability to the study of religious organizations like congregations. In this paper, a recently-developed model of organizational social capital will be used to (1) demonstrate why religious institutions matter and (2) examine several issues facing contemporary religious institutions.