Legàmi e funzionamenti: riflessioni su Sen, Granovetter e Burt

The paper investigates the extent to which the role of social ties and social net-works matters for a fundamental issue within Sen’s human capability approach, namely the question of how and why different individuals have different abilities to translate resources into functionings. Building on the contributions of economic sociologists such as Granovetter and Burt, we argue that the presence of social contact networks (or lack thereof) could be key to determine such differences in the level to which functionings are achieved. We also briefly discuss the implica-tion of our analysis for economic policy.