Finally...(part 2)

And the second part of the literature review is about social capital and charities. Basically...

Social capital can be particulalry important for immigrants who can lack financial capital, as well as cultural capital and human capital (in terms of the extent to which their learning skills are recognised in a new society). There are also layers of social capital - friendship/kinship networks, associations and "cultural categories" (or interest groups). Charities play a role in linking all these layers in the C19. Charities are also important for the role they play in creating and maintaining connections and social capital, for instance through the performance or rituals and narratives, and the way in which these establish roles for donors or recipients. Charities can also be relatively neutral spaces that allow for bridging cross ethnicity, without necessarily compromising the ethnicity of those involved. Performances and roles within charities may also help maintain ethnic identification, as can the rules for participating or being helped in those charities. ie they help maintain the group's borders. They can also help bridging social capital between classes, and working class people's involvement was often as more than just beneficiaries. Elites within immigrant communities may also use these spaces to ensure their own cohesiveness, as well as to link with other powerful groups outisde the community (for instance - in both cases - in soliciting donations).

Social capital was under stress in the early C19 under the challenges of urbanisations and industrialisation. There was also increasing spatial and cultural segregation between rich and poor. This meant less interactions between rich and poor, and possibly declining generalised trust and confidence. This may help explain the move to both the New Poor Law and the "new charity" with its emphasis on investigating need and character. However, social capital within immigrant communities may still have been higher and, along with established cultural practices and attitudes, this may explain the survival of more traditional forms of charity which corresponded more to traditional alms giving rather than to control and invvestigation. Differing forms and amounts of social capital within immigrant communities may also help explain the different paths of integration and development of different ethnic groups. The role of charities in the creation and maintenance of social capital can therefore mean that the study of charities helping immigrant communities may thus explain the varying fortunes of immigrant communities in the nineteenth century.

And that's it. Will try and write about other things on this blog now.

Finally...

I've finally written up the second version of my literature review and then attempted to present all of it in 10 minutes at a proper academic conference (well, the new researcher session at NCVO's researching the voluntary sector conference anyway). Presentation wasn't too bad bearing in mind how much stuff I had to say and that none of the audience were really interested in the early nineteenth century...

Anyway, the basic argument is:
Social control has been used as a concept when looking at charities at this point but it needs to answer who is the controller, who is controlled and how are they controlled. In terms of charities, it's not a simple middle class controller because of how decisions were made and who made them in an organisation (for instance working class paid staff or staff who of a different ethnicity to the trustees) and that many organisations were working class led. And the poor could to some extent negotiate with charities through personal knowledge of precedent and those who made decisions (especially with those charities where donors voted on who should get help) - and pick up some elements of what is on offer and reject others (eg with education). Charities also weren't that effective, with relatively small numbers helped and with the more controlling aspects dumped when the demands of applicants became too much. Irish charities also weren't that interested in changing the working class into bourgeois Britons as they still emphasised traditional alms giving and with Catholic ideas about the "holy poor".

More on the social capital argument later in the week...