Social capital facilitates emergent social learning

A robust literature on social learning examines how social capital facilitates communication of explicitly articulated knowledge between disparate individuals and groups, especially after disaster. We argue that this work has overlooked social learning that takes place via emergent channels through social capital. We divide social learning into four categories depending on whether the knowledge in question is transferred between agents or newly discovered by an agent, and whether the process takes place emergently and implicitly or as the product of direct intention and explicitly. We then demonstrate the empirical relevance of emergent social learning processes that take place in social capital networks during disaster recovery. Using qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews of members of religious communities recovering from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, we show that social capital can be site of emergent processes of social learning that enable discovery of new knowledge and transfer of existing knowledge about resource uses, including social capital.