Epistemic social capital: a figurational theory of the relational conditions of scientific inquiry

Scientific knowledge production is fundamentally relational, yet existing approaches provide only a limited account of how relations formed through epistemic practice become a collective capacity that enables or constrains subsequent inquiry. This article develops Epistemic Social Capital (ESC) as a theoretical framework for addressing this problem. Integrating social capital theory, Elias' sociology of figurations, and Merton's normative structure of science, we define ESC as the scale-relative, emergent, and non-appropriable relational capacity constituted and shaped through established epistemic practices and conditioning the circumstances under which scientific inquiry unfolds. The proposed mechanism distinguishes epistemic practices from ESC as the emergent relational capacity they sustain and reshape, and ESC in turn from epistemic productivity as its contingent realisation. Four propositions specify the formation and erosion of ESC, its conditioning effects, the recursive development of scientific figurations, and relations across analytical scales. Four provisional dimensions - collective accessibility, evaluative openness, critical revisability, and cumulative continuity - render the concept empirically researchable without reducing it to a single metric or treating particular practices and outcomes as ESC itself. By explaining how scientific communities generate, reproduce, transform, or weaken the relational capacities on which knowledge production depends, ESC provides a common analytical language for comparative, processual, and multilevel research and establishes the foundation for a broader empirical research programme.