Styles of capital

Styles of capital are studied in accounting and economics. Without knowing them, auditing cannot ever be trustworthy, and a trusted auditor has only social capital not instructional capital backing him. This leads to a variety of abuses, like for instance Enron.

Accounting standards always start with knowing what styles of capital are.

Natural capital (land), financial capital (money), and infrastructural capital (equipment) are the most basic. The ISO 19011 accounting standards put ISO 14000 considerations for ecosystem health as the primary focus, with ISO 9000 labour standards as the secondary focus. This is in line with economics theories that say that the environment must ways come first, because, it provides things everyone needs to stay alive.

It is also common now among accounting gurus to talk of social capital (interpersonal and community trust), instructional capital (like code or claims made in this Content Wiki), and individual capital (human creativity and skills bodies are trained in, which is "used up" as labour the same as equipment is used up in production). Richard Florida has made an analysis of urban ecology which shows that human creativity is the major economic driver of urban areas - he built it on an analysis of Jane Jacobs.

A work description should indicate when or where any of these styles of capital are used or used up or stressed or strained or risked. However, to know where actual human patience or social capital is involved is difficult. Trolls explore this on a regular basis as part of their work.

External links

• Wikipedia: capital (economics)
• http://www.lho.org.uk/meth/socap.htm - methods of social capital measures