SOCIAL CAPITAL IN SANTA CATARINA’s STATE: The case of the forums of regional development and a preamble to the sociology of the catarinense economical history

Abstract

This work is a review about Capital social em Santa Catarina: o caso dos Fóruns de Desenvolvimento Regional (EdiFurb, 2006), whose author tries to analyze the political decentralization which has occurred in Santa Catarina in recently years, explaining about  the neo-institutionalism theory, whose main purpose is to demonstrate the political reforms effects. Nevertheless, the purpose is explain the relationships between these reforms and the possibilities of producing social capital. In this sense, the work presents the Regional Development Forums with their main actors, pointing their difficulties, their potentials and virtues. However, an additional aspect is analized, i.e., that social capital is a present phenomenon in the process of social economic constitution in Santa Catarina State, which contributes to explain its developing model, associated with governamental planning and entrepreneurs and their European origins. In this sense, there is a strategic reference to Maria Luiza Renaux Hering work, entitled  Colonização e indústria no Vale do Itajaí: o modelo catarinense de desenvolvimento (Edifurb). There, the author emphasizes a Schumpeterian view about the importance of self-made man to explain economic development of Santa Catarina. And yet, her work offers interpretative ways about the historical presence of social capital. It shows, in all cases, that the enterprises was been characterized by trust and cooperation. In this sense, the own idea of the self- made man becomes vulnerable, because the coletive aspect of the enterprises is invariable by the author’s examples. So, the present review suggests a revisal of the economic history of Santa Catarina State, which accepts contributions of the idea of social capital and permits, more than enough, an approximation between economy and sociology.