Social Capital

John Field

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134476725
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The term 'social capital' is a way of defining the intangible resources of community, shared values and trust upon which we draw in daily life. It has achieved considerable international currency across the social sciences through the very different work of Pierre Bourdieu in France and James Coleman and Robert Putnam in the United States, and has been widely taken up within politics and sociology as an explanation for the decline in social cohesion and community values in western societies. It has also been adopted by policy makers, particularly in international governmental bodies such as the World Bank.

This fully revised third edition of Social Capital provides a thorough overview of the intense and fast-moving debate surrounding this subject. New material encompasses:

• Social capital and the internet
• Social capital and the economists
• Changing policy understandings of social capital
• Social capital and resilience in tough times

This clear and comprehensive introduction explains the theoretical underpinning of the subject, the empirical work that has been done to explore its operation, and the influence that it has had on public policy and practice. It includes guides to further reading and a list of the most important websites.

1

The genesis of a concept

Relationships make a difference. In a digital age, our personal ties still matter to us, as individuals and as members of groups, and we often put a great deal of effort into maintaining them. As individuals, we are defined at least partly by whom we know and how we know them. More broadly, bonds between people also serve as building blocks of the larger social edifice.

Of course, these ideas are not new. On the contrary, they shaped the discipline of sociology from its origins. Emile Durkheim, for instance, was particularly interested in the ways that people’s social ties served as the threads from which society was woven together. Durkheim drew a sharp contrast between the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of pre-modern societies, based on inherited hierarchies and familiarity based on similarity, and the ‘organic solidarity’ of the mobile, complex, urban social systems of his own times. The interdependence of strangers meant that modern society:

… does not become a jumble of juxtaposed atoms … . Rather the members are united by ties which extend deeper and far beyond the short moments during which the exchange is made.

(Durkheim 1933: 226)

Since Durkheim wrote these words, our society has changed in ways that he never imagined. For me, the idea of social capital corresponds to the new value of social ties in an even more mobile, fluid, diverse and interdependent world.

The central idea of social capital is that social networks are a valuable asset. Initially, the idea of relationship as a type of capital was simply a metaphor. Strictly speaking, the metaphor implies that connections can be profitable; like any other form of capital, physical or financial, you can invest in it, and you can expect a decent return on your investment. This simplistic translation is too literal; we are better off understanding the term as a loose analogy with economic capital, rather than an ambitious attempt to provide an accountant’s balance sheet for people’s social networks.

Initially, economists largely thought of capital in financial and physical terms. Only in the 1960s was the idea stretched to cover people and their capacities. Initially developed by Theodore Schultz (1961) and then by Becker (1964), the idea of human capital was a tool to help economists measure the value of workers’ skills. For Schultz and Becker, labour was much like any other factor of production, which could be more or less productive as a result of investment in such things as education or health care. But they still thought of human capital largely in strict economic terms: its value was measurable, its worth could be added up and compared, the relationship between inputs and outputs was a direct one, and any changes in value could be accounted for in terms of a common currency.

Social contacts are not easily reduced to a simple set of common denominators. Measuring the returns on friendship or neighbourhood is complex, to put it mildly, as is estimating our investment in our ties. Much of the debate about social capital has taken place outside the discipline of economics, among social thinkers, political scientists, educationalists and historians. Why, and how, has the metaphor developed into a broad social science concept in this way?

Three authors have made seminal contributions: Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman and Robert Putnam. These writers have been said to represent three ‘relatively distinct tributaries’ in the literature on social capital (Foley and Edwards 1999: 142), and there are certainly important differences between them, as I show below. Bourdieu, while certainly not the first to use the term, was the first thinker to produce a systematic conception of social capital, and he shares with Marxism a concern with questions of unequal access to resources and the maintenance of power; Coleman takes as his starting point the idea of individuals acting rationally in pursuit of their own interests; Putnam has inherited and developed the idea of association and civic activity as a basis of social integration and well-being. Despite these differences, all three consider that social capital consists of personal connections and interpersonal interaction, together with the shared sets of values that are associated with these contacts.

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu came slowly to the concept of social capital. He was very much a European sociologist, interested in analysing relations of domination and privilege. He proposed that elite groups were able to use cultural symbols as markers of distinction, both signalling and reinforcing their position in the social structure. He gave force to this view by using the metaphor of ‘cultural capital’, pointing to the way that groups traded on the fact that some types of cultural taste enjoy more status than others. Moreover, Bourdieu emphasized repeatedly, people’s ownership of cultural capital did not just mirror their resources of financial capital. Shaped by family circumstances and school tuition, cultural capital could to some extent operate independently of monetary wealth, and even compensate for lack of money as part of an individual’s or a group’s strategy to pursue power and status (Jenkins 1992).

Bourdieu’s early writing on social capital was, then, part of a wider analysis of the diverse foundations of social order. He chose the word ‘capital’ deliberately, arguing that people used their social ties and cultural tastes in exactly the ‘self-interested’ way that they used trade to make a profit. While people might not think of their tastes and relationships in this way, Bourdieu argued that they are deployed as assets, alongside economic capital (which in general he thought of as paramount). Social and cultural capital could be used both to build solidarity within a particular group, and also to create subtle boundaries between different sub-groups within the elites; further, in combination they could be deployed to breed new capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977).

Bourdieu’s treatment of these terms varied considerably in depth, with by far the greatest attention going to the concept of cultural capital. In his monumental study of taste and distinction among the French middle class, which draws on a vast battery of empirical indicators of cultural capital, he furnished only one indicator of social capital: membership of golf clubs, which he held to be helpful in oiling the wheels of business life (Bourdieu 1984: 291), though he did publish one brief separate outline of his thinking on social capital, which he described modestly as ‘provisional jottings’ (Bourdieu 1980), and operationalized the concept from time to time in his studies of social reproduction.

In a discussion first published in 1973 of the ways in which members of professional groups secure their position (and that of their children), Bourdieu initially defined social capital as a:

… capital of social relationships which will provide, if necessary, useful ‘supports’: a capital of honourability and respectability which is often indispensable if one desires to attract clients in socially important positions, and which may serve as currency, for instance in a political career.

(Bourdieu 1977: 503)

He later refined his definition as follows:

Social capital is the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 119)

Bourdieu also noted that in order to maintain the value of their social capital, people had to work constantly at sustaining and renewing their connections.

To understand Bourdieu’s thinking on social capital, we need to remember that his main concern was the understanding of power and domination. He reminded readers that all capital ‘is accumulated labor’ which ‘takes time to accumulate’, challenging the conventional view that immaterial exchanges – love of the arts, friendship and marriage – were somehow to be respected as ‘disinterested’ (Bourdieu 1986: 421–422). In his ‘provisional notes’, Bourdieu claimed that the idea of social capital helped understand the ‘principle of the social assets’ which explained how:

… different individuals obtain a very unequal return on a more or less equivalent capital (economic or cultural) according to the extent to which they are able to mobilize by proxy the capital of a group (family, old pupils of elite schools, select club, nobility, etc.).

(Bourdieu 1980: 2)

Characteristically, then, social capital functions to reproduce inequality, and does so more effectively because it helps to ‘disguise the economic aspect’ (Bourdieu 1986: 253–254).

Different volumes of capital are what distinguishes ‘the major classes of conditions of existence’, and within each of these major classes, Bourdieu detected what he called ‘secondary differences’ on the basis of ‘different distributions of their total capital among the different kinds of capital’ (Bourdieu 1986: 114). He illustrated the interplay between connections and cultural or financial capital with the example of members of professions, such as lawyers or doctors, who exploit their ‘capital of social connections, honourability and respectability’ to win a clientele in high society, or make a career in politics (Bourdieu 1984: 122). By contrast, those who rely primarily on their educational qualifications are, he suggests, the most vulnerable in the event of ‘credential deflation’, not only because they lack connections but also because their weak cultural capital reduces their knowledge about fluctuations in the market for credentials (Bourdieu 1984: 142).

In keeping with his view of capital as the product of accumulated labour, Bourdieu emphasized that connections need work. Maintaining connections requires ‘investment strategies, individual or collective’ aimed at turning more or less incidental relationships, such as those of neighbourhood or workplace or distant kinship, into social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term. And this depends on the ability to create what he called ‘durable obligations subjectively felt’ (Bourdieu 1980: 2; 1986: 249). Investing in networks in this way requires an ‘unceasing effort of sociability’ (Bourdieu 1986: 250).

Bourdieu: limitations

Bourdieu is one of the most influential figures in contemporary sociology, and it is not surprising that some view his theory of social capital as the most theoretically coherent and persuasive sociological approach to the concept (Portes 1998; Fine 2000; Warde and Tampubolon 2002). His work on multiple capitals has been used by many other researchers, most notably – and very productively – in an ambitious and wide-ranging mapping of social class in contemporary Britain (Savage et al. 2015). Yet, if Bourdieu’s contribution is undeniable, neither is it without flaws.

Bourdieu’s focus on social capital as exclusively an elite resource is particularly problematic. His only explanation for relations of affect was that these lend durability to the exchange; he did not allow for the simple fact that some people like (or love) and dislike (or loathe) each other more than others, even though they may move in the same cultural world and share the same attitudes. He overemphasized the role of kinship and intermarriage. And despite his concern to acknowledge agency, in general his theory appears to be rooted in a relatively static model of social hierarchy, which is ill-suited to deal with the more fluid, open and loose social relations of late modernity. Cruises, dinner parties, soirées and chic sports are hardly the exclusive stuff of today’s elites, and more recent applications of his theory (as by Savage et al. 2015) have had to examine a much broader range of tastes.

Further, like Coleman and Putnam, he represented social capital as largely benign, at least for those who possess high volumes of it. He did allow for the possibility of ‘embezzlement or misappropriation’ of social capital, particularly among those who are allowed to represent institutionalized social capital. Examples of delegated social capital include the pater familias who is entitled to speak on behalf of the family, or the aristocrat who benefits from the institutionalized connections of the nobility (Bourdieu 1986: 251). Yet, these are simply social capital’s counterparts of criminal embezzlers in respect of economic capital. While Bourdieu’s concern for inequality and power are an invaluable corrective to Putnam and Coleman (as we shall see), his one-sided emphasis on the merits of social capital for its holders is a decided weakness.

Nevertheless, Bourdieu is an important figure in the transition of social capital from being a metaphor to becoming concept. In particular, his analysis of the general logic of social capital and its accumulation, as well as of its interplay with other forms of capital and their accumulation, stands independently of the particular evidence that he provided in respect of the bases of social capital in 1960s France. It is remarkable that Coleman, in particular, paid little attention to his contribution, and it is encouraging that over the last ten years his stock appears to have steadily risen among scholars of social capital.

James S. Coleman

An eminent American sociologist, James Coleman has had considerable influence on the study of education. In a series of investigations of educational attainment in American ghettos, Coleman was able to show that social capital was not limited to the powerful, but could also convey real benefits to poor and marginalized communities. Social capital, according to Coleman, constitutes a resource because it involves expectations of reciprocity, and goes beyond any given individual to involve wider networks whose relationships are governed by trust and shared values.

Coleman’s impact upon the concept’s development has been far- reaching, particularly in the English-speaking world. In part, this reflects the conceptual clarity and erudition which he brought to what had previously been a somewhat under-theorized, marginal notion. In part, it reflects Coleman’s general standing in the social sciences: by the time of his death in 1995 he was one of the most respected and widely debated social theorists in the United States. Like Bourdieu, his work is extensive in its methodological and thematic scope, and has attracted its fair share of controversy. The place of social capital in Coleman’s work occupies space within a wider attempt to grapple with the basis of social order, witnessed most dramatically in his monumental late study, Foundations of Social Theory (Coleman 1994).

Coleman’s ambition was to develop an interdisciplinary social science that could draw on both economics and sociology. He was particularly influenced by the work of Gary Becker, who like himself was employed at the University of Chicago. Becker’s work on human capital, which applied the principles of economics to the study of education, the family, health and discrimination, used the framework of rational choice theory (Becker 1964). Coleman was a major figure in the rise of rational choice theory in contemporary sociology, and he sought to place his conception of social capital within this intellectual framework. Rational choice (or rational action) theory shares with classical economics a belief that behaviour results from individuals pursuing their own interests. This then raised the question of why people cooperate, other than for immediate gain.

The concept of social capital was for Coleman a means of explaining how people manage to cooperate. One example of how this works, much favoured by rational choice theorists, came from game theory. In the mind-game known as the prisoner’s dilemma, two individuals are kept in separate cells, then told that the first to inform will receive favourable treatment; the dilemma is whether to keep silent, in the hope that no other evidence exists to prove guilt, and receive no punishment at all if the second player behaves similarly; or confess and receive a reduced punishment. Rational choice theory predicts that the second option will be chosen over the first, since each prisoner knows that the other is likely to confess when faced with the same choice.

In general, then, rational choice theory predicts that each individual will follow their own best interests regardless of others. Yet, in reality, people still cooperate, even in university economics departments. As Barbara Misztal puts it, rational choice theorists constantly face the task of showing that cooperation is consistent with the ‘postulates of individualism and self-interest’ (Misztal 2000: 109). For Coleman, the idea of social capital provided a resolution of this problem, by incentivizing cooperation in a way that was broadly comparable to, and congruent with, the role of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market in classical economic theory (Heinze and Strünck 2000: 179).

Coleman’s interest in social capital originated in attempts to explain relationships between social inequality and academic achievement in schools. During the mid-1960s, Coleman was asked to direct a major survey of educational achievement and opportunity among different ethnic groups. This piece of research, mandated by an Act of Congress and overseen by the United States Office of Education, has been described as ‘a watershed in social science research’ (Heckman and Neal 1996: 84). Generally known as the Coleman Report, the study confirmed that family and community background characteristics tended to outweigh factors related to the nature of the school itself (Coleman et al. 1966).

Subsequently, Coleman led a series of empirical studies of achievement in private schools compared with public schools. Using details of family background and cognitive achievement scores, Coleman and his collaborators initially found that pupils tended to perform better at schools with religious affiliations even when other factors, such as social class and ethnicity, were taken into account (Coleman et al. 1982). A follow-up longitudinal study provided additional evidence on the performance of pupils in Catholic schools, and also showed that these tended to have lower absenteeism and drop-out rates than among pupils of comparable backgrounds and ability in state schools. The findings were particularly striking for pupils from the most disadvantaged socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, where families had least to contribute to help their children’s cognitive development (Hoffer et al. 1985; Coleman and Hoffer 1987).

Coleman argued that the most important factor in explaining this pattern was the impact of community norms upon parents and pupils, which functioned to endorse teachers’ expectations, and he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The genesis of a concept
• 2. The power of connections
• 3. A walk on the dark sided
• 4. Is the Internet killing social capital?
• 5. Social capital in policy and practice
• Conclusion
• References
• Index