It was and remains hard, at least for me, to resume the critique of social capital in a half-hearted way, not least because I have always sought to command both its position as a whole across the social sciences and how this has evolved, and continues to evolve, with its rise and fall within the World Bank particularly emblematic if not entirely representative. So, in 2004, I once again searched over the literature, not having done so for a number of years. The stockpile was intimidating, and the subsequent flow equally so. Just to catch up was a monumental task, inevitably selective and only partially completed. And so it has remained. But it did mean that my knowledge of social capital ranged far beyond the triggering mechanism derived from and around the account of the World Bank’s social capitalists.

From then until now has been a cycle of beginning to draft chapters for the book, only to be interrupted by other commitments and finding a new round of literature to absorb upon resumption. To my shock, I found that ten months had passed from the beginning of January 2008 until I was able to resume what has now proved to be the final stage of this labour of Sisyphus. In the interim, of course, the literature had continued to accumulate, more in spread of subject matter than depth of analysis. This meant that I was faced with the daunting task of organising my discussion of the material, both incorporating the new into the old framework of what had been confronted before and stretching that framework to accommodate as comfortably as possible what I chose to include. This has not simply been a matter of principle but of practice since, as already indicated, the literature has been expanding faster than it can be read and absorbed, let alone be written about.

Having published so much about social capital already, I was also determined to explore new themes and motivations, and to write a new book rather than merely updating the old one. Of course, some of the themes from the old book are retained, the most important being that social capital is the degradation of, not a contribution to, social science. It is worth laying out the features of social capital that were recognisable even after a short life of little more than a decade.

First is the breadth and scope of social capital across a number of dimensions. As will become apparent, what it is ranges over all forms of individual interaction (with the partial exception of those within market and global relations and those within the state – why not who you know within the state bureaucracy and the international elite in particular?). The same applies to other non-individualistic forms of interaction or collectivity as embodied in institutions and culture, widely conceived and ranging equally extensively from the family or household through to all other levels below the international (with the exception again of the state, as before, and with the curious absence of the global as a sphere of application for social capital; but see Chapter 7). The applications of social capital have also been astonishingly diverse, with some presumption that its presence offers potential benefits to outcomes. And the spread of social capital across disciplines is also extraordinarily impressive, much like, if to a lesser extent, the presence of globalisation across the social sciences – which, interestingly, has experienced a similar timing in emergence and drive to prominence (Fine 2004a).

Second, though, this marriage between social capital and social theory has been an unfortunate one. For social capital has both reduced and distorted the contributions that are available from the rich traditions across the social sciences. In short, social capital has been parasitical, only prospering in its own degraded and degrading way through drawing upon social theory selectively and, inevitably, at its expense.

In part, third, this is because ‘social capital’ is itself a sort of oxymoron. It presumes that there can be a capital that is not social. It is rarely made explicit what this asocial capital is, where the boundary lies between it and social capital, and what role is played by that other capital in itself and as complement to, or constraint upon, its alter ego. Not surprisingly, despite the terminology, the relationship between social capital and capitalism is usually glossed over.

Fourth, as a result, the economy, and economic theory, tend to remain unexamined in the context of social capital. There is some loosely formulated presumption that markets cannot work at all or cannot work perfectly in the absence of social capital. This opens the potential for (more) social capital to enhance the working of the market, just as it enriches non-economic behaviour and outcomes through benevolent collectivity.

Fifth, whilst the economy only occupies a shadowy existence across the other social sciences, it offers a highly attractive analytical fix for economics itself, as a residual theoretical and empirical factor. Differences in economic performance had traditionally been seen as the consequence of different quantities of capital and labour. The former had been refined to incorporate various types, such as physical, financial, environmental and human capital. Social capital, for economists in their own limited departure from neo-liberalism, could be added to capture anything else that might contribute to performance, with the non-market such as social capital understood as the path-dependent response to market imperfections.

Sixth, it is not only within economics that social capital finds a natural home as a type of capital to represent a residual explanatory factor that fills out the social as opposed to the economic. Social capital has generally served so much as a residual explanatory factor for other disciplines and applications that it has frequently pushed itself forward to become a leading explanatory factor. This can only be so through setting aside what are other, arguably more powerful, determinants of economic, social and cultural life. Generalising over such an extensive literature as is offered by social capital is dangerous; but omissions (apart from the economy other than as something given but to be enhanced), despite being significant elements in social interaction, include class, the state, trade unions, and political parties, substance and organisations. For, although there is a healthy literature on social capital and political activity as such, it is remarkably removed from the substance of politics itself, whether by content or nature of activity (other than whether voting or not – but in support of what, how and with what beliefs?). Not surprisingly, social capital has appealed across the spectrum of conventional politics, from Bush to Blair, so anaesthetised and yet flexible is it in its political and uncritical content. And, by the same token, from scholarship through to rhetoric, cooperation and collectivity for mutual gain have been emphasised at the almost absolute expense of power, oppression and conflict.

Seventh, the policy perspective induced by social capital, although never put in these terms, is self-help raised to the level of the collective. However good or bad things might be, they could be better if people interacted more, trusted one another, and cooperated. Social capital offers the golden opportunity of improving the status quo without challenging it. Everything from educational outcomes through crime prevention to better psychological health can be improved if neighbours and communities would only pull together and trust and interact with one another.

Eighth, Bourdieu is acknowledged to have been an early purveyor of social capital, and he placed considerable emphasis on both its class dimensions and its contextual content. He offered a much deeper understanding of social capital than what has followed, but also a narrower definition, as he distinguished it from cultural and symbolic (and economic) capital. These differences have been lost in subsequent literature by rounding up the symbolic and the cultural into the social, whilst equally dropping the class and contextual content for universal notions of any collectivity across time, place and application. In place of Bourdieu, the rational choice or individualistic foundations of other renditions of the concept of social capital, drawing on the influence of the rational choice sociologist James Coleman, have come to the fore, although these have been disguised, since acknowledgement of them would reduce the appeal of social capital to those other than of a neo-liberal bent. And the most recent literature has begun to bring Bourdieu and context back in and to stand aloof from rational choice. Yet this renders the concept different in every application, so that transposability between case studies and analytical categories relies upon a leap of faith. In this respect, social capital is treated as if it were capital in money form, along with presumptions of fluidity between its various components and effects (something of which Bourdieu himself was guilty). This all renders the relationship between social capital and neo-liberalism to be complex and shifting; see below and later chapters.

Ninth, social capital has become so prominent so rapidly as a result of what can only be described as an intellectual malaise within academic life, although it is a moot point whether this has worsened over the concept’s lifetime as a result of the pseudo-commercialisation of research activity. Precisely because of its amorphous, all-encompassing nature, social capital is an ideal example, for want of a more tempered term, of the hack academic (‘hackademic’?). To put it bluntly, social capital has prospered at the expense of intellectual integrity, as publications, research grants and popular punditry have been exploited for gain, academic, personal or otherwise. Social capital plus topic X has been the route to open new avenues and close others, generally both replicating and reducing what we knew about X previously and adding to the forward momentum of social capital in scope of definition and application.

Tenth, proponents of social capital have exhibited a stunning capacity to absorb criticism, when recognising it, by continuing to move forward. Opposition is readily perceived as seeking the addition of an otherwise missing variable or method, so that the remedy is to incorporate what is otherwise absent. Where criticism is offensive to the core values of social capital, it is usually simply ignored, especially in relation to the points already elaborated. This is so much so that those contributions that do acknowledge criticism do so selectively, for the purpose of supporting their own particular contributions.

Eleventh, as should be apparent, irrespective of other criticisms, social capital has become definitionally chaotic, as it is imbued with so many different variables, approaches and applications. Again, this has frequently been acknowledged in the literature, only for another definition or approach to be adopted, compounding rather than resolving the collective conceptual chaos (the social capital of social capital!). There is a significant, if heavily outweighed, literature that is critical of social capital and, almost certainly, a body of social scientists who will have nothing to do with it because of its conceptual chaos and incoherence. Yet this aversion to social capital inhabits a parallel universe with limited dialogue with, or response from, the ranks of the social capitalists themselves.

Last, social capital has thrived in the particular intellectual context peculiar to the 1990s, in which there has been a reaction against the extremes of both neo-liberalism and postmodernism. Social capitalists have rejected the belief that markets work perfectly and have embraced the idea of getting real about how people go about their (daily) lives. This is also characteristic of social capital’s counterpart, globalisation, which in many other respects is both the complement and the opposite to social capital. As already indicated though, the global is notable for its absence from the world of social capital; the latter is more about communities accepting the world as it is and bettering themselves on this basis as a form of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’. Thus, and further, the ‘dark side’ of social capital, as in corruption and community or racist violence for example, is often acknowledged only to be brushed aside. This places social capital in a peculiar relationship to neoliberalism, although some see it as an instrument and cloak for it.

These features of social capital form the starting point from which a further ten years of literature have been assessed, not only to track the most recent developments but also to explore new themes. Since I have been a tutor for research students for 30 years or so, it seemed appropriate to use that experience to offer advice on how (not) to do research. This is made explicit in Chapter 2, where lessons are drawn from my social capital work to address the task of how to go about writing a literature survey. One central lesson offered is to find one or more organising ‘pegs’ on which to hang a survey to give it analytical as opposed to descriptive content. And the chapter itself takes up the peg of the degradation of social science that is perpetrated by social capital, further deploying the metaphor of McDonaldisation.

The chapters that follow can in part be interpreted as having one or more pegs of their own, not always made explicit. Chapter 3 examines the history of social capital as a concept and, equally, the constructed history that has been imposed upon it. It shows that social capital does not have a history of any substance – and for good reason given its legion faults. Indeed, it is necessary to explain why social capital should have become so prominent, and so rapidly so, at the end of the second millennium and, yet, was so pale in presence previously. And, to the extent that social capital does have a history, it is with a content that is the opposite of the one that has been discovered or invented to support the substance of this bloated orgy of literature confined to the late twentieth century. For social capital has previously been perceived to be an economic category, not one of civil society, signifying both the aggregate capital as a whole and the systemic properties to which this is attached. In other words, social capital in history has been about the political economy of capitalism and not about civil society detached from the economy.

Despite its short history, social capital has had a rich and rapid evolution. As previously documented in my earlier book and by many others subsequently, its origins in the radical sociology of Bourdieu were discarded for the rational choice functionalism associated with James Coleman before this, in turn, was veiled by an expanding scope of definition and application and a multidisciplinary spread. Inevitably, the result was to expose the deep limitations of the concept for the tasks it was being asked to accomplish, especially by omission of many of the standard variables across social theory. As is now all too apparent, this did not lead to the rejection of social capital. On the contrary, the omissions provided the foundations for the continuing expansion of social capital by adding what had previously been missing, with limited care and attention to individual, let alone collective, coherence. The result, as documented in Chapter 4, has been what might be termed the ‘bringing back in’, or BBI, syndrome, itself a peg of wider potential applicability than to social capital alone. The chapter demonstrates this process for social capital in general and across particular topics, such as BBI class, gender, race and context. The ultimate irony is provided by BBI Bourdieu, or BBBI. But, whatever Bourdieu’s merits and deficiencies in positing the category of social capital, BBBI restores at most a pale version of his original intent and content – other than with a few exceptions that prove the rule. This is hardly surprising since what was left out, and so is subsequently open to BBI, is the radical and critical content of social theory. And this can hardly be satisfactorily grafted on as an afterthought or qualification to a stock that is so disregarding of such considerations.

Such a state of affairs has not been without its positive side, as illustrated in Chapter 5, where the curious absence of social capital from the discipline of history is observed and explained (although the historical application of social capital by non-historians is far from rare). The resistance by historians to the unsubtle charms of social capital is explained differently as far as social history and economic history are concerned. For the former, sensitivity to context and to the major factors in historical change that social capital has tended to overlook has meant that the discipline has cold-shouldered the concept, not least in light of the previous, if light, tradition of perceiving social capital to be economic capital as a whole or to be social and economic infrastructure. In principle, though, social capital is far more attractive to economic history, especially cliometrics in its newer form of emphasising that institutions matter in light of market imperfections. But, as no more than an accident of timing, ‘institutions’ as the all-embracing category to capture the non-economic had already attained prominence within economic history before social capital emerged as a potential alternative residual concept to occupy the putative space between market and state (and the state itself has also been reduced to the status of institution, designed like any other to respond to path dependence, market imperfections, and so on). So, whilst social capital might have been an ideal conduit for the newer (market imperfections) economic history, it had already been eclipsed by the new institutional economics in that role.

The relationship between social capital and (the discipline of) history offers a case study of social capital within a discipline, one in which social capital has failed to establish a stronghold, not least because of its limited capacity to deal with context and the major determinants of economic and social change in any convincing fashion. This is the first of three case studies, each distinctive (and suggesting the adoption of pegs along the lines of why social capital should have different impacts across different and within specific disciplines), with the two others following in Chapters 6 and 7. The World Bank (and, to a lesser extent, development) and social capital is covered in Chapter 6. Social capital was, of course, well established at an early stage within the World Bank, and this benefited from extensive coverage in my earlier book, which teased out the Bank’s own particular am...