Putnam on late C19 voluntary action (inc social control) and Clemens on three levels of social capital

More from Patterns of Social Capital...

Putnam and Gerald Gamm have results from surveys of town directories in the second half of the C19, with some additional drilling of membership records of a few organisations. Their chapter details the main results they find, which is that rapid population growth and cumulative results of growth inhibit the development of civic associations.

They suggest that this would not be expected given the main theories about the growth of voluntary action, which is that it either:
* is about the middle class trying to exert social control on a working class population that was no longer as disciplined/stable due to urbanisation and industrialisation
* is due to a genuine benevolent desire to meet the needs of the poor or distressed (which could also include working class charity)
* is down to working class or immigrant people’s desire for cohesiveness in the face of rapid change
* is caused by a desire to express identity and establish replacement networks in a new society

Their conclusions are hesitant about what the actual cause may be. It could be due to the higher costs of not participation in such organisations for individuals in smaller towns (though this would not be a dynamic theory and would therefore not explain such organisations’ growth), or due to national networks seeking as an outcome a local branch in each city/town rather than on focussing on their reach into the overall population. Local social “entrepreneurs” may also have found it easier to get people involved in places where there was less competition for (leisure?) time from other attractions.

Overall, it does suggest that people (at least in the late nineteenth century in America) didn’t really join associations to primarily achieve the kinds of aims which historians would look at. Perhaps, it was more subconscious, or about the other individuals involved, or even the reward of the rituals and norms involved in membership. Which maybe suggests again a more anthropological approach...

Clemens meanwhile disagrees that social capital is portable or fungible, a fallacy resulting from social capital as metaphor which invites comparison with financial capital (it is instead “fundamentally embedded, rooted in ‘norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement’”). She also stressed the political - social capital is structured at three levels which “constitutes a terrain for politics and a landscape that is reconfigured through politics”.

She suggests that the levels are:
1- trusting relationships / social ties between individuals, which can be either within or without organisations, which can develop skills and capacities (which might or might not be easily transposed to other sets of relationships) (she says that “the genius of nineteenth century voluntary associations lay in both t heir cultivation of transposable routines for acting collectively...and their elaboration of national federations grounded in the sociability of communities of friendship networks”
2- formation of associations, which change the relationship to allow for action - “formal organization transforms a network of interpersonal ties into a system of roles and routines. New members are more easily integrated and expansive campaigns more easily co-ordinated”
3- “finally these interpersonal networks and formal associations were both embedded in cultural categories that structured discourse about civic life”. More than one kind of organisation might provide education for poor children, but the public identity of the organisation “gave distinctive meaning to their efforts”, with organisations anchoring meaning. They were particularly important at this period because “before survey research promised direct access to individual opinions, organizations served as critical signals of position within public debate”.

Her presentation of these three levels brings together the potentially conflicting descriptions of others on social capital which can often include in an unreflective way discussion of individuals’ social capital power with vague discussions of “civil society” or Habermas’ public space. They can be a useful way to analyse social capital alongside the discussion in public policy of bonding, bridging and linking social capital.