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.