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Introduction in his 1992 presidential address to the american Sociological association, Coleman (1993) argued that there is an irrevocable loss of social capital in Western industrial societies. this he attributed to technological changes, the growth of the welfare state and the rising number of large organizations providing services that were once produced in the family and the neighbourhood. a few years later, putnam (1995a, b) applied this argument to the United States and raised the question of whether america’s stock of social capital had actually diminished in the course of time and, if so, why. he answered the first part of this question in the affirmative. he found evidence of a decline in social capital in the 1930–1998 period. as to the second part of his question, he hypothesized like Coleman that there are multiple causes for this trend, for example, the growth of the welfare state, technological changes (the …