Engendering social capital: Women workers and rural-urban networks in Indonesia's crisis

Recent approaches to social capital have cautioned against the view that social networks are resources to be called upon in times of crisis. We contribute a feminist perspective to this argument and call attention to the gendered power relations of social capital and social networks. We draw on field studies that examine women migrants' rural-urban networks in two regions of Indonesia during the 1997-99 economic crisis period. Our findings direct attention toward the gender-specific limitations of social capital as a resource for development, and identify some ways in which the costs and benefits of social capital are organized by gender. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.