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.