Theoretical basics of studying socio-psychological capital of a person in changing multicultural society
On 19th of September has been held seminar from series "Culture Matters" with Alexander Tatarko, senior researcher, assistant professor of Department Organizational Psychology. He made a presentation on following topic: "Theoretical basics of studying socio-psychological capital of a person in changing multicultural society".
A. Tatarko in his report justifies input of concept of "socio-psychological capital of a person" into terminological apparatus of social psychology. Research problem can be formulated as follows: studying of relationships between socio-psychological characteristics of a person, which promote integrative processes in larger social groups, and his/her economic-psychological characteristics in a multicultural society.
Theory of social capital in sociology explains the processes of accumulation and further use of "productive" relations in groups and communities. However, this theory in its development has faced many serious problems. Alexander Tatarko proposes new concept of socio-psychological capital of a person that systematically describes integrative resource of psychological attitudes toward various aspects of social reality to solve these problems. Recourse mentioned before facilitates achievement of planned goals and improves well-being of an individual in a group.
The speaker in his report emphasized distinction of socio-psychological capital from social capital and psychological capital. Social capital implies all relationships all that a person may have, psychological one describes a person as it is, whilst socio-psychological capital examines person’s attitudes to groups of membership and relationships with surrounding people. Subject of socio-psychological capital is a person, not a group as in social capital. This capital regulates behavior of an individual in a group, making it more productive. High level of socio-psychological capital of individuals in a group is able to increase effectiveness of this group. Hence, if group achieves better results, this makes people, members of a group, be more satisfied. Accordingly, one may conclude that the socio-psychological capital have to be linked to the level of well-being at both group and individual level.
Socio-psychological capital of a person forms in two dimensions of personal relations: person-person and person-group (society). Both these dimensions are in relationships of complementarity and balance, and can be represented as axis Cartesian coordinate system. Size of socio-psychological capital can be represented as a square formed by values for each axis. This approach allows to quantify the degree of the balance.
At the end of seminar author presented seven research positions that caused big discussion in the audience. There have been expressed critical points of research of Alexander Tatarko as well as good points were mentioned.