Social capital has been mobilized as an explanatory variable in various empirical studies, but these studies have been unable to overcome the ambiguities inherent in a pre-scientific notion. The present study tests structural autonomy, one of the two established hypotheses on social capital, from the point of view of social network analysis. The test is applied in a case study of the academic co-authorship networks of accounting science programs in Brazil during the period from 2002-2010. The dynamics of selectivity present in this specific network, i.e., criteria of intertemporal choice, institutional endogamy and mutual choice by productivity, were also analyzed. We observed that there were negative correlations between the authors' constraints and their academic productivity indices, cascading intertemporal choices and endogamous choices according to institutional and productivity criteria.

This study examines the influence of criminal embeddedness on the intensity of criminal behavior among primary and secondary school students in a large Brazilian city. A database conceived by the Center for the Study of Crime and Public Security at the Federal University in Minas Gerais is used to analyze the involvement of youths displaying delinquent behavior at home or at school and how school performance and peer relationships are effected. Based on differential association and learning theories, the main hypotheses are (1) the greater the criminal embeddedness, the lower the degree of school satisfaction as well as future expectation of continued higher education, and (2) the greater the criminal embeddedness, the greater the risk of the intensity of deviant and criminal behavior. Applying statistical linear and nonlinear regression models, findings indicate that the criminal embeddedness has a negative and statistically significant association with the student's level of school satisfaction.We use the normative term to differentiate it from behaviors or attitudes associated with offenses or deviances from the normative standard or the legal codes of society.

This article examines theoretical frameworks that rival in his way of explaining social cooperation. Two different perspectives are presented through research of Jean Piaget and authors of the rational choice theory. As the first means cooperation from the moral cognitive structures, the second sees it as the result of coordination of interests of rational actors. After presenting recent publications in the field of cooperation, are exposed and compared the main theoretical perspectives already mentioned, identifying their contribution to the understanding of cooperative phenomena, their points of convergence and distancing. We list the main research programs derived from the theoretical premises of Piaget and the authors of the rational choice theory.