Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the study of social capital focused on the level at which it is embodied, cross-comparing two prominent camps that have emerged in the social capital literature: a communal level and an individual level. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the intersections and departures between communal level and individual level conceptualizations of social capital according to the social dynamics of action within social exchanges that they stimulate, the processes by which social capital is activated/mobilized and the rewards they yield, and their linkages to inequality through network diversity. Findings This paper articulates new directions for future research in social capital: more analytical precision for studying returns to social capital; more efforts to transcend the individual-communal divide; the depreciation of social capital or tie decay; and recognizing the importance of ties whose value does not come from the ability to provide instrumental gain, but just from their very existence. Originality/value Social capital has informed many influential agendas in the social sciences, but the sheer volume of which has largely gone unscoped. This paper reviews this literature to provide an accessible introduction to social capital, organized by social processes foundational to sociology and a novel contribution to the literature by articulating new directions for future research in the area.

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Criticism against quantitative methods has grown in the context of Bbigdata^, charging an empirical, quantitative agenda with expanding to displace qualitative and theoretical approaches indispensable to the future of sociological research. Underscoring the strong convergences between the historical development of empiricism in the scientific method and the apparent turn to quantitative empiricism in sociology, this article uses content and hierarchical clustering analyses on the textual representations of journal articles from 1950 to 2010 to open dialogue on the epistemological issues of contemporary sociological research. In doing so, I push towards the conceptualization of a social scientific method, inspired by the scientific method from the philosophy of science and borne out of growing constructions of a systematically empirical representation among sociology articles. I articulate how this social scientific method is defined by three dimensions -empiricism, and theoretical and discursive compartmentalization -, and how, contrary to popular expectations, knowledge production consequently becomes independent of choice of research method, bound up instead in social constructions that divide its epistemological occurrence into two levels: (i) the way in which social reality is broken down into data, collected and analyzed, and (ii) the way in which this data is framed and made to recursively influence future sociological knowledge production. In this way, empiricism both mediates and is mediated by knowledge production not through the direct manipulation of method or theory use, but by redefining the ways in which methods are being labeled and knowledge framed, remembered, and interpreted.

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Existing social movement theories subsume protests into abstract conceptualizations of society, and current ethnographic studies of protests overburden description. Through a case study of London protests, this article transcends these limitations by articulating a social ecological approach consisted of critical ethnography and autoethnography that unearth the organizational strategies and symbolic representations exchanged among police, protesters, and third-party observers, whilst charting the physical and symbolic characteristics of space bearing on these interactions. This approach points to a conceptualization of power at work as transient, typological structures: (a) rooted in collective agency; (b) both mediating and mediated by symbolic representations; (c) whose sensibilities are determined by symbolic interpretations; and (d) thrown into binary opposition between protester power and police power, who mutually represent meanings to resist and be resisted by.