An Exploratory Review of Regional Perspectives on Social Capital and Occupational Studies

Social capital is one of the most influential yet fragmented concepts in the social sciences. To gain insight into its substantive use within specific domains, this review explores how social capital (SC) has been applied in occupational studies, with particular attention to regional perspectives. Building on Adams and Fitch’s bibliometric mapping, it applies abstract-based topic modeling with citation data to identify thematic clusters and theoretical foundations within a corpus spanning over four decades. The results show that SC remains widely used across diverse themes. Citation patterns vary sharply across topics, with few sharing unified theoretical anchors. A closer look at studies on the topic of regional perspective reveals that SC is more employed as a background concept rather than through theorization or explicit operationalization. These findings refine Adams and Fitch’s conclusions on the fragmentation of SC research and highlight research opportunities for connecting SC mechanisms to regional perspectives.