Creative and social capital: concepts, problems and contradictions

Abstract

The article deals with creative and social capital (SC) in the light of creative society. SC has both positive and negative aspects. The first are trust, economic development, ecological consciousness, etc. The latter are intolerance for certain individuals, stagnant relations, depression of the initiatives, etc. The negative aspects have been connected with the lack of creative aspirations within a social group. There is a dialectical relation between social and creative capital (CC). Although creative workers need certain support from their social environment, creativity does not only use social ties to spread creative results, but also ignores them by appealing to a new creative community. The comparison of SC and CC opens very different approaches towards society. In the case of SC, we still have the privileged classes who consolidate the whole society. Even in the case of the creative class we face the relics of (Post)Marxist economic approach if we correlate the activity of so called creative class with economic prosperity of a region. In the case of creative society, we have very different approach. If every person is more or less creative, we do not have the creative classes or parties as holders of CC any more. This (neo)liberal approach means also the dissemination of any form of capital, as well as elimination of attitude formed by economic priority in our societies.