Social Capital and Economics

Social Values, Power, and Social Identity

Asimina Christoforou, John Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415834131
• eBook ISBN: 9781135050672
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume provides a collection of critical new perspectives on social capital theory by examining how social values, power relationships, and social identity interact with social capital. This book seeks to extend this theory into what have been largely under-investigated domains, and, at the same time, address long-standing, classic questions in the literature concerning the forms, determinants, and consequences of social capital.

Social capital can be understood in terms of social norms and networks. It manifests itself in patterns of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. The authors argue that the degree to which and the different ways in which people exhibit these distinctively social behaviours depend on how norms and networks elicit their values, reflect power relationships, and draw on their social identities. This volume accordingly adopts a variety of different concepts and measures that incorporate the variety of contextually-specific factors that operate on social capital formation. In addition, it adopts an interdisciplinary outlook that combines a wide range of social science disciplines and methods of social research. Our objective is to challenge standard rationality theory explanations of norms and networks which overlook the role of values, power, and identity.

This volume appeals to researchers and students in multiple social sciences, including economics, sociology, political science, social psychology, history, public policy, and international relations, that employ social capital concepts and methods in their research. It can be seen as a set of new extensions of social capital theory in connection with its themes of social values, power, and identity that would advance the scholarly literature on social norms and networks and their impact on social change and public welfare.

Part I

Introduction

1 Social capital

Social values, power, and social identity

Asimina Christoforou and John B. Davis

This volume provides a collection of critical new perspectives on social capital theory by examining how social values, power relationships, and social identity interact with social capital to determine the different ways in which social capital is created and transformed in different societies. Thus the volume aims to extend social capital theory into what have been largely under-investigated domains. At the same time, it also seeks to address long-standing, classic questions in the literature concerning the meaning and nature of social capital, the role it plays in different kinds of societies, and its determinants (economic and non-economic; individual and collective; regional and national). Ultimately, following Grootaert and Bastelaer (2002), the challenge of social capital theory is to give meaningful and pragmatic content to the rich notion of social capital, and define and measure suitable indicators of social capital across a variety of social economic contexts.

Social capital can be understood in terms of social norms and networks. It manifests itself in patterns of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. We argue that the degree to which and the different ways in which people exhibit these distinctively social behaviours depend on how norms and networks elicit their values, reflect power relationships, and draw on their social identities. This makes social capital research inherently complex, and this volume accordingly adopts a variety of different concepts and measures that incorporate the variety of contextually-specific factors that operate on social capital formation. In addition, because of the complexity of social relationships, the plurality of human motivations, and the role played by the wider social and economic context in determining different patterns of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation, the volume employs an interdisciplinary approach that combines a wide range of social science disciplines and methods of social research. The authors of the chapters included in the volume are all respected contributors to social capital theory who come to the subject from different investigative disciplines. They are brought together here on this new project to open up new, alternative perspectives in social capital research.

Despite the enormous literature that has emerged in the past 30 years, few authors have focused on the structural features of the economy, society, and polity within which individual motivation and disposition are embedded and through which public interventions are channeled and produce desired – or not – results for the expansion of social capital. Our objective in this volume is to challenge standard rationality theory explanations of norms and networks and examine contextual factors that influence the formation of social capital and its impact on public welfare.

Thus, questions remain regarding:

• the relationship of social capital with contextual/structural factors of human behaviour;

• the interaction between the individual and the social, the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’;

• processes of identity formation and reflexive creation;

• the distribution of material and social resources;

• the role of power relations and social conflict;

• the role of state institutions in the creation or destruction of social capital;

• the role of social capital in the reproduction of income inequality and social segregation;

• the third sphere of the economy, social organisations, and social economy and the ways they use and produce social capital to promote collective goals, values, and identities;

• social capital as a resource for local development and poverty eradication;

• social capital as a source for social change; and

• new definitions and measures of social capital to incorporate contextual factors, like values, power, and identity

These are issues that have received less attention in past work on social capital, and are therefore worth pursuing in a new volume critical of how social capital has evolved in the literature in the past decades. Indeed this book seeks to build on criticisms of social capital theory (cf. Fine 2001, 2010) which argue that the social capital concept is merely used to conceal the consequences of an economic imperialism in which the ‘social’ collapses to the ‘individual’; power relations and unequal structures are overlooked; democratic government and participatory governance are replaced by minimal state intervention and communitarian ideologies; and the sole identity maintained is that of the ‘consumer’, who side-steps his/her non-material needs and social obligations, and surrenders his/her freedom of choice to profit-maximising firms. There is also need for a historical and contextual account of social capital, as a response to standard treatments, which have been led by Putnamian or World Bank versions of social capital and are based on the individualist, instrumental, and functionalist assumptions of the rational choice principle encountered in economics.

Extending social capital thinking to emphasise social values, power relationships, and social identity, in our view requires attention to be given to the following types of issues:

• How do social identities influence the different ways in which social capital is accumulated? Can theories of social embeddedness that stress individuals’ interaction with groups and networks improve our understanding of the (trans)formation of social capital? More importantly, can social identity theory explain how differential forms of social capital – particularised/generalised, bonding/bridging – emerge?

• Are there alternative frameworks in the social capital literature that account for social inequalities, power relations, and political conflicts? Can Bourdieu’s critical, but largely ignored, notion of social capital help in this regard?

• What is the link between social capital and corruption? How do different social values, levels of trust, and societal inequality affect this relationship? Can we provide a better understanding of corruption and the ways we deal with it compared to Beckerian exchange-based thinking?

• How do rising socio-economic inequalities affect social networks? How does this influence the development prospects of regions? What does this imply for countries that are undergoing transition and being exposed to the highly competitive and unregulated, global economy?

• What is the impact of concentrated poverty and racial/ethnic diversity on local social capital? Do these factors mitigate or reduce solidarity, trust, and association within and across groups? How can the study of local social capital in poor neighbourhoods re-define urban poverty and social policy?

• How does social capital secure public welfare, especially in cases of disaster? Do local social networks activate to provide support to disaster victims? Or do these very networks produce obstacles, especially in a context of social segregation? How can these conditions prevent marginalised social groups, like women, migrants, and lower classes, from obtaining access to resources and taking part in recovery?

• How do various social organisations that have typically been associated with social capital, utilise norms and networks to pursue social objectives? What role do socio-organisational and wider contextual factors play?

• How do sports organisations use and produce social capital? Was Putnam right in assuming that sports instill a sense of ‘team-work’ that could function as a basis for cultivating civic virtue in the public sphere?

• How can cooperatives and social enterprises that operate in the third sphere of the economy use and produce social capital? What kind of norms and networks help these organisations pursue their general-purpose goals for the provision of public goods and services? Can social capital strengthen their potential to expand the social economy and re-define the concept of entrepreneurship as one that moves from profit-seeking to participatory governance?

• What is the conceptual history of social capital? What meanings have been attached to it from nineteenth-century political economy to its resurgence in the late twentieth century? How can the past inform and inspire future research in restoring the social dimensions of social capital?

• How can social capital be ‘operationalised’ in order to take account of contextual factors that are not captured by conventional individual-level indicators and their aggregates? What other methods can be applied to measure social capital?

An important goal of the volume, then, is to focus on these particular dimensions of social capital theory in order to determine: (a) the role they play in the transformation or reinforcement of social and economic relationships, and (b) how these transformations affect public welfare and social policy concerns. The question is how do trust, reciprocity, and cooperation as the forms of behaviour which norms and networks promote, contribute to economic and social transformation. The notion of transformation can roughly be understood in terms of the ways in which social capital either does (‘possibilities’) or does not (‘limitations’) provoke or facilitate shifts in economic and social structures. Change in or reinforcement of existing economic and social structures then has feedback effects on trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. Thus trust, reciprocity, and cooperation and change in economic and social structures need to be investigated in terms of how they mutually affect each other.

This type of analysis requires a more contextually-defined and interdisciplinary approach to the explanation of societies’ norms and networks that influence the state of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation than much current thinking about social capital employs. To do so, this volume will distinguish particularised and narrow-interested forms of trust and cooperation associated with bonding social capital and more generalised and broad-interested forms of trust and cooperation associated with bridging social capital to avoid extreme views that see social capital either as a panacea to economic and social problems or as a source of social and economic stagnation, so as to allow for a more balanced treatment of both ‘possibilities’ and ‘limitations’ of social capital.

The volume should appeal to researchers and students in multiple social sciences, including economics, sociology, political science, social psychology, history, public policy, and international relations, that employ social capital concepts and methods in their research; and be seen as a set of new extensions of social capital theory in connection with its themes of social values, power, and identity that would advance the scholarly literature on social norms and networks and their impact on social change and public welfare.

A multiplicity of analytical concepts and tools that derive from different social science disciplines are combined to shed light on the forms, determinants, and effects of social capital. We ask long-standing questions on how social capital develops and affects social welfare by re-considering the role of contextual factors that conventional mainstream approaches fail to account for. This book tries to give new direction to social capital research:

• It introduces alternative ways of understanding and measuring social capital: social capital is examined in relation to social identity, while methods of social accounting are introduced and applied to measure social capital.

• It explores Bourdieusian conceptions of social capital within the context of the habitus-field nexus that has not been adequately developed and applied in the literature.

• It draws attention to empirical studies of regional and local social capital for local development and welfare. Social capital is examined in relation to conditions of poverty and inequality, especially in urban areas of the developed world and the rural regions of the less-developed world. These studies are combined with recent cross-country analyses that recognise the context-specific aspect of social capital and discuss the differential effect of social inequality and economic policy on norms and networks that either reverses or reinforces past civic behaviour.

• It includes themes from the field of third sector research that investigate how social capital is used and produced by various social organisations. Despite the rich literature on third sector activities (voluntary organisations, NGOs, social enterprises) and its direct relevance to aspects of social capital, fewer studies have systematically explored this relationship.

The book is separated into five parts and twelve chapters. After setting out the objectives of the book in Part I, in Part II the chapters discuss old questions and new problems regarding the ways in which social capital can be re-assessed in order to introduce concepts and measures that take into consideration the influence of contextual factors. Part III offers alternative theoretical frameworks for the study of social capital by re-considering its relation to inequality and power, corruption, and social identity. Part IV includes studies that empirically investigate the interrelationship of poverty, inequality, and social hierarchies with various dimensions of social capital at the national, regional, and local level. Finally, Part V focuses on activities in the third sphere of the economy in order to examine the role social capital can play in the promotion of the social objectives of sports organisations, cooperatives, and social enterprises.

We begin in Part II with a chapter written by James Farr on the history of ‘social capital’. This chapter provides a unique outlook on the use-history of the concept of social capital. It has five objectives: (1) review the first known user, Lyda J. Hanifan; (2) present earlier uses – especially John Dewey – that bring (critical) pragmatism into the history; (3) introduce the inventive, pedagogical uses by Mary Austin and others; (4) revive Edward Bellamy’s utopian rendering of the concept; and (5) recover nineteenth-century political economists – from Marshall to Sidgwick to Marx – who surveyed ‘capital from the social point of view’. It ends with the presentist themes of ‘public work’ and ‘civic education’ as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• I Introduction
• II Old problems, new questions
• III Alternative theoretical frameworks
• IV Social segregation and social capital
• V The third sphere and the social economy
• Index