Social capital contested

Abstract

The purpose in this paper is to specify certain basic ways of conceptualising social capital (SC) in order to bring out the contested character of it. The paper starts by touching on the origins of the concept. This is followed by a critical overview of the views of P. Bourdieu, J.S. Coleman, A. Portes and R. Putnam, and an attempt is made to show the fragmentation of the different approaches, which in itself creates difficulties for the meaningful utilisation of SC in social-scientific research. The adoption of the SC concept by international organisations and national governments has fanned, it is claimed, its ideological use. If the notion of SC is to be salvaged, because there is something useful to it, it is therefore necessary to overcome the evident confusion and fragmentation.

Keywords:

• social capital
• ideology
• Bourdieu
• Portes
• Putnam

Acknowledgements

The author's thanks are due to William A Darity Jr, Dennis Smith, and to three anonymous referees for their advice and suggestions.

Notes

1. Essentialism: to consider that terms or social phenomena are what they are because underlying them there is some true or real ‘essence’ (Fuchs 2001, pp. 3, 98).

2. Reference to SC was quite limited until 1995–1996 (about 40 articles until that date, in all, and no book), but thereafter, over the last 10 years, there has been an explosion of books and articles that mention SC in their title. I estimate that presently there are over 40 volumes, and more than 2,000 social-scientific articles in English that bear the phrase ‘social capital’ in their title. This has come about from searching just through electronic search engines in providers of full-text electronic versions of journals. Also, an e-search of the ‘Proquest Digital Dissertation’ database (accessed on the 25th of June 2007) showed that 411 dissertations (almost all PhD theses, and in English) had the phrase ‘social capital’ inscribed in their title. The first of these theses was dated back in 1971. All the remaining 410 were from 1989 and after. Of these 410, 129 were completed during the last two years; 288 during the last five years; 389 during the last 10 years.

3. The dimension of (exploitative) social relations is sine qua non for Marx for the emergence of capital. Thus, we know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer (Marx in Capital, Vol. 2, as quoted in Fisher 1896, p. 512).

4. By SC Marx means the total capital available in any given industrial or modern society, which consists of the aggregate of the various distinct and diverse individual capitals. The sum of capitals is characterised as SC since the total of the society's members is directly or indirectly involved in its creation through the division of labour (see Marx 1976, pp. 776–782). See also the related presentation in Law and Mooney (2006a), pp. 38–40).

5. Trust is reliance, as Jones notes (2001, p. 15917).

6. It has been reported that the formulation ‘SC’ first emerged in the work of economists, such as Alfred Marshall (referred by Grootaert and Bastelaer 2001, p. 18) and John Hicks, in order to describe the distinction between temporary and permanent stocks of physical capital (Woolcock 1998, pp. 159, 198).

7. Farr (2004) in his investigation of SC's conceptual history has shown that Hanifan's ideas were intellectually related to the critical pragmatism of John Dewey. Dewey himself firstly explicitly referred to SC in 1900 (Farr 2004, p. 17).

8. According to a similar formulation SC is ‘the aggregate of actual or potential resources that are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu 2001, pp. 102–103).

9. Bourdieu's conceptualisation of SC which, as Fine (2007), p. 49) puts it, attempts to bind the relational and the contextual dimension entails a notion of capital in its fluid moment. However, it is objected that such fluidity cannot be carried over into market-like exchange; ‘non-market relations cannot be reduced to comparable quantification’ (p. 49).

10. Coleman obviously ignored that Bourdieu had previously reflected on SC as the former fails to give relevant bibliographical references to the latter's work. Still, it is interesting that Bourdieu and Coleman are interconnected by the fact that they both have worked on aspects of sociology of education (Tondi 2005), while both have been elaborating on the notion SC in relation to their theories from within this field.

11. The finding that there is a negative aspect in, or ‘dark side’ of, SC has also been stated by other social scientists, e.g. by James Putzel (1997), Carlo Trigilia (2001), and John Harriss (2002).

12. In the 16 already recorded forms of non-economic capital (Svendsen and Svendsen 2003, p. 627), an additional two may be added: ‘spiritual’ capital (Malloch 2003, Berger and Hefner n.d.), and ‘fraternal’ capital (Sharad 2004).

13. S. Szreter (2002), pp. 575–557) designates the parenthood of this distinction to Gittell and Vidal; also see in Woolcock and Narayan (2000).

14. The well-known Granovetter distinction between weak and strong ties, which correspond, respectively, to relations that one may have with one's ‘friends of friends’, or the bonds between the members of a family and close friends, has been utilised to formulate the distinction between ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’, as forms of SC. Analogously to the weak and strong ties distinction, the first form operates as a ‘bridge’ between loosely-connected different social groups, while the second one operates by strengthening the cohesion of the members of a primary or close group and thus to ‘bind’ it; see in Granovetter (1973, 1983) and in Svendsen (2006).

15. Often, modern economists are inclined to see in SC, mostly in its Putnamian variant as it is more available, a metaphor. However, they reject it as a form of capital as well as the usefulness of the analogy by pointing out that it is inherently unable to increase economic value or productivity (as K. Arrow maintains, mentioned in Streeten 2002, p. 7), or that capital stands for a stock of produced or natural factors of production that are expected to yield productive services for some time’ (as Solow argues, mentioned in Streeten 2002, p. 7); SC cannot compare with this. On the other hand, other economists have come to recognise SC as a form of capital, but do so, and this is telling, by unquestionably accepting Putnam's version of it as their premise, e.g. Glaser et al. (2002) or Stiglitz (mentioned in Law and Mooney 2006b, pp. 253–254). Despite attempts to bridge the gap between them, e.g. by Partha Dasgupta (2005), differences remain irreconcilable.

16. Journal Stato e Mercato, 57 (December), 1999 – the articles are by Arnaldo Bagnasco, Allesandro Pizzorno, Forunata Piselli and Carlo Trigilia (correspondingly pages 351–372, 373–394, 395–3418 and 419–440). Later on, most of these articles became available in English, but they have not been known widely.

17. According to a recent Eurostat study, Greece's population ranks highest in smoking among the EU-25 countries (2006).

18. Haerpfer et al. (2005) are of the opinion that only formal SC can be measured. The adoption of such a distinction, namely, between formal and informal SC in relation to appropriateness of research methods, helps to highlight that informal SC can be studied by non-measurable and, in particular, ethnographic methods. In this direction certain mobility has surfaced; see in Svendsen (2006) and in Koniordos (2005).

19. Specifically, SC in Halpern (2005) is definitely a recipe calling for non-economic solutions to social problems. A recipe, that is, which also incorporates the agenda and the discourse of the so-called ‘third way’: i.e. notions such as social participation, social cohesion, social inclusion, community, all that which supposedly lead to the strengthening of civicness and in this sense of SC, too.

20. In fact, economic sociologists have already taken up the challenge. For example, in his book on SC, on which I have not expounded, due to lack of space, Nan Lin (2003) has formulated an interesting attempt to analyse SC as a form of capital analogous to other forms, particularly to economic capital. In subsequent work (Lin 2005, 2006), he proceeds to further explore SC's bases in networks.