Scouting for drivers of the European knowledge society: The role of social participation

Abstract

Knowledge is a relational good. The flow of interactions among the individuals of a group provide the necessary opportunities to share the existing knowledge and use it to further accumulate the (human) capital, which is the main productive input for the development of any knowledge economy. In this sense, the opportunities of social interaction are per se a resource and a dimension of knowledge. The analysis of individual civil participation in different kinds of civil formal organizations across Europe further confirms the existence of different European social models and hints to a possible positive parallelism between the effectiveness of economic policies and social policies aimed at fostering social participation. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.