Neighbouring

I went to the launch of Respect in the Neighbourhood yesterday. The book is edited by Kevin Harris of the rather good Neighbourhoods blog. Two things were guaranteed at the launch seminar - that the chair introducing the seminar would have their own anecdote about neighbouring, and that there would be an academic who would challenge what we really meant by [insert concept here} and would go on to use the words discourse and reified. There was a lot of talk about the decline of the local neighbourhood as the basis for social support and the issue of anti-social behaviour.

So in that vein, the pic above shows my neighbourhood with the postman urinating against the wall opposite the flat that was pushed over by some kids a couple of weekends ago. At the moment, I can see people in the flats opposite doing the same as me, crouched over their computers. Not much sign of neighbouring there then.

And it's unlikely to change as the area's moved to virtually all the houses and flats being rented out to people who move every six months when the lease is up. This isn't necessarily such a problem for the kinds of people who live here (in their late 20s and early 30s and mostly without kids) whose friendship networks span London (and probably the world given the mix of South Africans, Australians, Poles, French and Germans in the area) but it does get to be a problem for those who can't access such mobility and are more tied to their local area for such support (for instance elderly people, children and those on very low incomes).

It's also a split you would have had in the nineteenth century. Although there was greater neighbourhood support (although this wouldn't have been much in the way of financial support) the poor were much more tied to their local area. Most of those displaced in slum clearances or to make way for railways stayed nearby (adding to overcrowding) because they needed to stay near potential jobs and to maintain their place in their local neighbourhood network of support in case of times of need. The rich meanwhile were able to access much wider networks of support and had access to wider information networks to enable them to take advantage of work or other opportunities (including, for some, globalised networks - such as those that the Surrey Docks were part of).

Social capital and civil society

From Generating Social Capital - Civil Society and Institutions in Comparative Perspective (which is a bit more interested in the political and democratic ramifications of social capital than I am for this particular study)

Useful bits include from the intro by Marc Hooghe and Dietlind Stolle:

social capital can be structural (eg networks) or attitudinal (eg trust and reciprocity) - I also have a note aking if it's also performative, but I haven't ever followed that up

there are two types of attitdutional - development of civic attitudes and social interactions (eg membership of a voluntary organisation) and institution centred (eg government, public policy and political institutions)

human and physical capital are individually owned but social capital is collectively owned (which goes back to my earlier post) and therefore vulnerable to neglect and freeriding

there are two traditions in approaching social capital - a sociological one interested in the large variety of benefits that social capital provides for individuals or for selected groups, and then a political science approach which "seems to apply a relatively normative view as social capital is often linked to largely societal benefits, mostly defined in terms of democractic goals" (I don't think they're very keen on this one - but it's interesting that they see a sociological/political split in approach compared to Dario Gaggio who sees an economic/sociological division)

they flag up the importance of overlapping memberships (from my memory, Putnam talks more about briding within a membership)

they quote various sources suggesting that "trust levels are typically lowest among the segments of the population with low living standards, with little educational attainment, and among minorities" it would be useful to see if this could be tested among Irish in early Victorian London

The chapter on the sources of social capital by Stolle has the following points (mostly about contemporary vol orgs):

some social capital theorists argue that social capital "does not exist independently in the realm of civil society: Governments, public policies, societal cleavages, economic conditions and political institutions channel and influence social capital such that it becomes either beneficial or detrimental resource for democracy

the problem of endogeneity - the effect of joining an association may not be much as those with higher levels of trust may just be more likely to join, and vice versa

claimes for vol orgs with face to face contact (over chequebook), bridging and overlapping ties and more mutual and egalitarian culture (over hierarchical) creating generalised values are not born out by empirical research

not necessarily much evidence of bridging in vol orgs (they tend to be a bit homogenous)

trust levels are linked to whether means testing or universal benefits are preferred - so maybe one could argue that the decline in social capital in early C19 led to more "scientific charity" approach over alms giving (contemporaries mostly seem to have blamed lack of direct contact between rich and poor but maybe this more generalized approach could be be worthwhile)

social capital research can miss more informal participation (eg women's networks of care and support)

A few more comments on social capital...

Some more comments on social capital, this time a chapter by Simon Szreter from Social Capital - Critical Perspectives:

Michael Woolcock - need to balance between embeddness and autonomy (which I guess is related to Putnam's bonding and bridging). eg: "among the very poor living in inner city ghettoes, those who have a relatively small number of intense family and neighbourhood ties and loyalties are too embedded and locked into their poverty"

Also large city agglomerations before modern communications were the most efficient information exchange systems (which maybe links into the work I'm doing at Living Streets on the value of the public realm and good public transport to economic and social progress)

A good example of trusting networks is non-conformists lending money to other non-cons to start businesses in early period of industrialisation.

Mid-Victorian period may have seen a decline in social capital (Szreter seems to be using a Putnamesque approach to area based or civic social capital) - "there is substantial evidence of decline and deterioration in social infrastructure and in measurable dimensions of social capital in the urban heart of the mid-Victorian industrian economy of mainland Britain" (though I haven't noted whether he actually have any more evidence for this).

A final point is that the C18 kind of social capital couldn't scale up to meet the new challenges of the mid-Victorian city - though you could argue this may be because it was the "wrong kind" of social capital in which bonding social capital within religious groups meant that common efforts were not effective. The restrictions on voting may also have restricted the ability of social capital to bridge social classes if the working class were not part of the "public" and traditional activities that crossed class boundaries went into decline.

So Robert Putnam then...

Re-reading my notes on Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone...

He talks about social capital as both a private and public good, and that both bonding (which he also calls "sociological superglue") and bridging ('sociological WD-40") social capital can occur in the same space/group (he uses the examples of a black church which bonds ethnicity but bridges class).

He has a good quote about the value of bonding social capital for ethnic groups - "Dense networks in ethnic enclaves...provide crucial social and psychological support for less fortunate members of the community, while furnishing start-up financing, markets, and reliable labour for local entrepreneurs. Briding networks, by contrast are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion". Based on this, one useful hypothesis for charities/immigrant groups would be the extent to which they could access social capital both within and without the community. It would be good to be able to plot this on an X (bridging) and Y (bonding) graph but I've no idea how to measure these in terms of charities (and Putnam says that there aren't surveys to distinguish between the two). There might also be differences in immigrant groups being able to use "thin trust" (another aspect of Putnam's social capital), which can extend beyond those one knows to a wider group. eg some immigrant groups may feel that they can trust those in their group whereas others may not (would religion have a role here?).

And on religious affiliation and social capital - "the social ties embodied in religious communities are at least as important as relious beliefs per se in accounting for volunteerism and philanthropy...Connectedness, not merely faith, is responsible for the benficence of church people".

On individual involvement and altruism - depends partly on involvement when young, and also people who have received help are more likely to help others: "giving, volunteering and joining are mutually reinforcing and habit forming - as Tocqueville put it, 'the habits of the heart'."

Poorer people need (and may therefore seek out?) more social capital precisely because they lack economic capital and can have difficulty gaining human capital (eg barriers to education). From a US perspective, Putnam suggests that church attendance is what influences black youths ability to gain employment, and this is becuase of the social networking effects rather than beliefs. need to check references to this in Kidd book on nineteenth century

On this, Putnam points out the role of ethnic networks as employment networks as they can use employees to recruit and train new employees as well as resulting in good employee morale and more company loyalty. It can also be related to acquisition of financing for smaller businesses, who can lack access to traditional financial institutions (and which were much more limited in nineteenth century London).

Social capital and historians

So finally I need to start writing some proper stuff on social capital. So I've been reading an article by Dario Gaggio (Do social historians need social capital?, from November 2004's Social History Review), which has a overview of social capital debates as well as a (shorter) section on whether social capital is a useful concept for social historians. Although it has the phrase "metabolized the lessons of post-modernism and critical theory", it makes some good criticisms of how Putnam (and via him, the wider public discourse) views social capital.

In particular, there is criticism of how the creation of social capital is not necessarily simply a "byproduct of actions pursued for goals other than its creation and nurturing" but can be more "instrumental" with individuals pursuing links for their own benefit ("goal seeking behaviour"). Which can be seen in terms of, for instance, Jewish elite involvement in charities in the 1800s. Related to this, Gaggio discusses the issue of who possesses social capital. Putnam's area approach implies that it belongs to communities or polities rather than individuals or networks (though networks could be communities?). Putnam's use of social capital is accused of being ill equipped to make sense of conflict ("Putnam never tells us who shares the shared goals whose attainment social capital is supposed to facilitate") but his forthcoming work on social capital and diversity may address this. The emphasis on individuals and networks use of social capital is probably more useful in my studies as I'm looking at social capital in relation to how it affected immigrant groups with the host community and relationships and change within those immigrant groups. Using it in this way should also be helpful in looking at how the poor used informal networks of help, though that's a bit outside my core area (which is also the flip-side of Bourdieu's work showing how the rich used it to maintain their position and it's role in preserving inequality.

Gaggio contrasts Coleman and Putnam's use of social capital as a "publicly owned, unintentionally produced and functionally deployed resource" (which he says is of little use to historians and is "theoretically and methodologically regressive") and Portes and McIntosh who view it as "the property of individuals and networks, as a resource that is constructed in the arena of political deliberation, and therefore as a relational practice that can be as productive of conflict and inequalities as of order and humanity".

He rounds it off by having a go at economists for using social capital to colonise sociology and other social scienses. preferring instead to use the phrase "political economy" which acknowledges how economic action is embedded in networks (cultures?) of social, political and cultural relations.

One critcism of the article though, is that it ignores that Putnam is seeking to engage in public policy debates. Putnam shows that high social capital for individuals and communities provides positive outcomes. Although his analysis may not be of use to historians, it does address those policy makers by demonstrating that policies that support social capital provide positive outcomes for individuals and communities. His critics don't seem to be me to be offering anything to policy makers to suggest alternative policies.

View from the kitchen window

DSC00390
Originally uploaded by Rick Hebditch.

Cold weather+lots of washing drying=misted glass

Historians use of "social control"

Historians have a tendency to try and grab ideas and theory from sociology, anthropology and other studies (perhaps as they go out of fashion in their original field) so it's quite easy to then criticise them for a relatively loose use of those concepts. Social capital might be one of those concepts which can be used now (which is part of my approach in probably a very clumsy way) and social control would seem to have filled a similar role in the past. From the seminars I've been to recently it seems to be "space", which is a shame as that's another concept I'm going to use. Anyway, I've been re-reading two criticisms of its use by historians.

Michael Thompson has a good go at historians use of it in a ReFresh article from 1987. Because of its inherent ambiguity (as both a general statement and a term drawn from theoretical sociology) historians have ended up spreading "confusion and incoherence" and led to "superfluous and redundant verbiage". He seems to see the term as simply having "descriptive but no explanatory power" in relation to its early development, but that it's been seized on by historians eager for a number of reasons:

to explain how the nineteenth century working class settled for their lot

to show how the various voluntary associations and clubs created an intergrating framework for the poor

to justify the study of less obvious topics like parks, pubs or sport by fiting them in to a wider more serious context for historians

Thompson doesn't have much time for any of this, particularly arguing that social change (the rise of respectability) was more down to "the discipline of factory work, the enforcement of law through more professional police, an improvement in living standards, and, related to this, a process of emulation of embodying a self-induced socialisation of ambition and aspiration". As a theory for explaining class relationships, it's not necessary (you can just say that employers manage and control workers and ministers lead congregations) and all that is left are "a couple of words that act as a salutory reminder that all political, social and economic institutions have some effects on types and standards of behaviour and contribute to the shaping of cultures or life styles". Those moral reformers of the nineteenth century were more "socialisers" rather than "controllers". Which maybe brings us back to social capital...

Marco van Leeuwen's The Logic of Charity also discusses social control in an appendix. He also criticised historians who are in danger of seizing on it in their desperation for a theoretical concept to underpin their work. He points out that it's important to consider who is controlling whom, how they do this and whether it is still taking place. He is also good on the importance of evidence. Sociologists are often dealing with more comprehensive evidence, and often the opportunity to test hypotheses with their own research, but historians are dependent on available source material. For instance he considers three kinds of power analysis in this context:

positional (eg a prime minister)

reputational (eg informal power)

decisional (who actually takes the decisions to proceed or veto change)

Historical sources will tend towards the positional in the absence of other sources. He therefore suggests that "a rigorous positional approach combined with more fuzzy reputational and decisional analysis may...be sufficient for a preliminary account of charitable power".

In other sections of the book, van Leeuwen suggests that charities in Amsterdam did have a social control function in that relief would be offered in return for accepting the social order and that "taking charity meant abstaining from illegal survival strategies and bowing to certain forms of behavioural pressure by the elites". Dutch charity was also keen to maintain those from the middle and upper classes who had fallen on hard times, and was more generous to them - as was also the case in England. In England, this could be justified in terms of it not being their fault (they were more deserving than the idle poor) but it was surely more a case of Victorian hypocrisy mixed with a desire to maintain people in their station and thus social order.

Social control

One of the concepts I'm attempting to include in the literature review is a discussion of social control. My first attempt at this was pretty sketchy (based on virtually no reading) so I've been trying to do a bit more reading without immersing myself too much in 1970s theoretical sociology.

Anyway, as a start I've been reading the introduction to Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, edited by Tony Donajgrodzki. He quotes Talcott Parsons definition of three types of social control in tackling deviancy:

"nip in the bud" actions

insulating the bearers of such motivation from influencing others

"secondary defences" which are able to varying degrees to reverse the viscious cycle process once it's begun.

Donajgrodzki also talks about the debate over whether deviancy leads to the development of social control or whether, as 1970s radicals would argue, social control mechanisms "actually create, shape and sustain it" (quote from J Young, The Role of Police as Amplifiers of Deviancy).

Another issue he raises is the role of "outsiders" (such as religious or racial minorities) in having "a social control function for the community at large, diverting and channelling conflicts inherent in capitalist society away from the consideration of its actual source".

Social control is also not necessarily conscious (for instance in charity) and can be seen in "subtler means" in the nineteenth century from the middle class elites in terms of soup kitchens, price controls and "gestures to assert psychological solidarity" like reducing consumption in times of dearth" (which would surely have helped exacerbate any recession). These seem to me to be similar to the ideas about "soft power" in international relations (ie funding the BBC as more effective in promoting British interests compared to direct military action).

Donajgrodzki's main point about the nineteenth century seems to be the change from the early 1800s when social control was more informal, even through personal relationships when it was in terms of institutions, compared to the later 1800s when it was much more mediated through institutions. He also says that the breakdown of personal social control mechanisms was very alarming for Victorians as they had a lack of experience of non-personal social control.

Too much text on this blog

So here's a photo of a Mexican zebra crossing (with added dropped kerbs to make it even more exciting)