In its most elementary form, the idea of social capital provides a name for an intuitive, transcultural recognition that we are inherently social beings, and that this has significant consequences for a host of other substantive issues we care about variations on the maxim that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” are to be found in languages all over the world.2 Social capital, defined as the norms and net- works that enable people to act collectively, provides a common frame of reference for conducting conversations about these important issues across disciplinary, methodological, ideological, and cultural lines, conversations which are vital— indeed necessary to the resolution of many of the issues themselves—but which otherwise occur too rarely. Indeed, I argue that facilitating such conversations has been social capital’s vital first-order contribution to scholarship and policy over the last twenty years. Pursuing these conversations in greater and contextually specific detail, however, requires recourse to terms and theories that are more precisely suited to the task.