The Wiley International Handbook of Mentoring

3Social Capital as Mentoring: A New Paradigm in Action

John M. Heffron

Soka University of America, USA

To understand social capital as mentoring is to understand the concept in a way that in the long history of its usage has seldom been explored, either by sociologists, by economists, by educators and philosophers, or by human resource professionals. It is to understand social capital in an entirely different way from one we are accustomed to—not, for example, as the tit‐for‐tat of “enforceable trust” (Portes, 1998, pp. 8, 15–18) or as a necessary resource for transforming an inescapable web of interconnectedness into one with benefits for a utility‐maximizing individual “agent,” not even as the brick and mortar of associational life, but as the product, a unique one, of the mentoring process itself. In what Coleman has called “the micro‐macro transition from pair relations to system” (1988, p. S98) the social capital that issues from the mentor/mentee relationship—a relationship of relative equality of purpose, in which mentor and student engage in a struggle of shared inquiry—is no longer a function of “the density of outstanding obligations” nor the obverse: “the ability of actors,” in one typical definition of social capital, “to secure benefits by virtue of membership in social networks or other structures” (Portes, 1998, p. 6). It becomes instead the larger ground, in Coleman's view the “system,” for the spread and perpetuation, the socialization, of the mentoring relationship ...