In the debate on social capital, it is usually assumed that membership in voluntary associations is highly beneficial for the formation of civic values among the association's affiliates. Despite these theoretical expectations, comparative studies have so far found only a weak statistical relationship between associational involvement and tolerance in Western democracies and a nonsignificant or even negative relationship in the case of Eastern and Central European countries. In this article, the author further investigates the negative relationship between associational involvement and attitudes of social and political tolerance, the "dark side" of social capital. The author shows that when members of voluntary associations build particularized trust rather than generalized trust, this decreases their already low levels of social tolerance. Such situations are especially common in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Associational involvement also has negative effects on political tolerance. Associations are social contexts within which processes of interpersonal influence and political mobilization take place. This results in the reinforcement of civic as well as uncivic orientations of associational members.

This article explores the relationship between trust and control by investigating the direct and indirect effects of different types of trust on company performance. A survey of small and medium size firms in Slovenia and BosniaHerzegovina is used to demonstrate how the level of trust entrepreneurs have in institutions and business partners influences the choice of governance mechanisms that coordinate economic activities among actors. The article shows that the institutional environment in Slovenia generates more trust, which enables actors to base their business relationships on trust rather than contract. In addition, when actors rely on trust it is usually institutional trust rather than interpersonal trust. In contrast, Bosnia, with a weaker institutional environment, generates less trust, leading actors to base their economic relationships on contract. However, when trust is used in Bosnia as a basis of business relationships it is likely to be centred on interpersonal trust. These results have important implications for the understanding of the process by which trust affects economic performance. The use of institutional trust as a basis for a governance mechanism may lead to increased economic performance of companies due to the inclusive nature of sociability patterns and tie formation since institutions generalize trust beyond a specific set of exchange partners. The use of interpersonal trust may limit economic potential due to its reliance on strong ties embedded within cohesive groups marked with closure.

How did the economic crisis impact social capital in European societies? The empirical studies conducted so far provide contradictory conclusions about the strength and direction of its influence. We argue that to better understand the effects of the economic crisis on social capital (social trust, formal and informal networks) it is crucial to examine both its impact on people's economic situation and the way it reshaped the relationship between individuals and political institutions and altered key political factors (political trust, the welfare state, political activism). Our analysis of European Social Survey data between 2006 and 2012 shows that changes in social trust were smaller than in formal and informal social networks. It also confirms that political factors played an important mediating role in producing these changes: changes in social trust and formal networks can especially be explained by the impact of the political factors, while variations in informal networks are mainly due to the changing economy. Moreover, the analyses show that while the economic crisis generally lowered social capital, some mechanisms such as a sense of togetherness and left-wing political activism, enhanced social capital.

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Our purpose in this article is to study the characteristics of a research group's social capital. We proceed from the theoretical distinctions made in the literature on social capital, such as weak against strong ties, structural holes against cohesion and homogeneity against heterogeneity of a group. We assume that research groups differ systematically with respect to the kind of social capital they possess, which has an impact on the scientific performance of the members of these groups. Social capital of research groups is conceptualized in terms of complete networks. We use the data from the Slovenian study of academic research groups conducted in 2003/2004. Research groups include Ph.D. students, their supervisors, and other researchers. They are representative of the Slovenian research groups, which include Ph.D. students under the "junior researchers" program financed by the Slovenian Ministry of Technology and Higher Education. We explore the variation in research groups' social capital by using a clustering approach. The analysis reveals three types of research group's social capital: weak social capital, strong social capital of a bonding kind, and strong social capital of a bridging type. Research groups with weak social capital are small, and cooperation ties among group members are weak. Bonding social capital is characteristic for small research groups with strong cooperation ties, which are embedded in a dense network structure. Bridging social capital is found in research groups which consist of a larger number of researchers from different institutions connected with one another with ties of a moderate strength. The network structure in the latter case shows structural holes. In the last part of the paper, we ask whether scientific performance of Ph.D. students varies according to the social capital of their research groups. We found that students who are involved in research groups with bridging social capital show significantly better performance than students who are members of the groups with either bonding or weak social capital. The relationship between the strength of ties and performance seems to be non-linear: it is the moderate strength of social ties and moderate group cohesiveness, which comes along the cooperation across different institutions and disciplines, that is the most beneficial for the performance of Ph.D. students.