heblog

BNP

2009-10-23T16:03:00.005Z

Me and Mubeen went along to the UAF demo against inviting Nick Griffin on to the BBC's Question Time. Not the hugest turn-out in the world, but it was good to see that people cared enough to protest. The debate around has been annoying me so here's what I think about the arguments put forward as to why he should be on...

Free speech means he should be on there - there's nothing stopping Nick Griffin from exercising his right to free speech (apart from the existing laws on libel, slander, conspiracy, incitement to racial hatred, etc). That doesn't mean you have to extend an invite to him on to a programme which is based on a shared recognition that the contributions of people are valid (even if you disagree with them) and that the debate is based mainly on reasoned arguments. A anti-democratic party mired in violence and lies and which denies the right of a large part of the population to contribute hardly meets the standards you'd expect and which you can debate with.

The BBC had to invite him on as it has a duty of impartiality - the BBC has a duty to ensure impartial coverage of news and current affairs, and can do by fairly reporting on the BNP. It doesn't have to invite Nick Griffin on to Question Time given the nature of the party and that his presence would act against other of the BBC's duties (including to avoid unjustified offence or likely harm). And surely the very nature of the programme which was all about Nick Griffin and what he has said or not showed that they couldn't in practice be impartial in this instance?

Question Time exposed Nick Griffin for what he is - the point of the BNP's appeal is that it's racist and everyone knows that (that's why people vote for them because they can blame a scapegoat for things they don't like about their lives or the society they live in). Having a racist on Question Time just helps to legitimise racist opinions. And no-one was making the case to expose the lies the BNP put forward about black or Asian people or "foreigners" being the reason for unemployment or long waits to get housing. That's why people vote BNP, and questioning Nick Griffing on what he might or might not have said about the holocaust or gay people is not going to change that.

The parties can't say that the BNP's voters are racist because they want their votes for themselves and it's why organisations like Unite Against Fascism are far more valid on this than, sadly, either Labour or the Lib Dems.

What Ken Livingstone said after the 7th July bombings could be applied to the BNP now: "I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

"In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

"They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do...will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do...you will fail."

Composing

2009-07-25T10:56:00.002Z

From the Observer Music Monthly article by Paul Morley on studying composing:

"I waited to see what difference it would make to me as a writer, as a listener, as I got used to the idea of bars, and how you fill bars with the notes and, indeed, lack of notes that you definitely desired, and let the bars dissolve, and how you structured a piece so that it didn't seem like an arbitrary collection of sounds but a considered piece that accurately reflected not understanding of technique but the mystery of thought and the strange fluctuations of feeling. A change did start to happen. I began hearing music in a new way; it was as though the music expanded into and beyond itself, and with my favourite music, my listening to the music as pure abstract sensation formed in distant, unknown ways merged with appreciating how it existed as the result of a calculated but uninhibited series of spontaneous, experienced and surprising decisions that both accepted the limitations of arbitrarily arranged rules and strived to stretch outside them."

Content of religion

2009-07-24T12:06:00.002Z

From review of Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England in the LRB of 23.7.09 by Eamon Duffy:

"The sterner kinds of Christian preacher and ascetic had indeed a perennial tendency to present Christianity as largely otherworldly, to see this world as nothing but a vale of tears. But that has never been the whole content of Christianity, or indeed of any other religion. For most of its adherents, most of the time, Christianity has been just as importantly a 'road to fulfilment', a motive for hopefulness about the world, and a call to the love of God and neighbour."

July 7th

2009-07-07T20:51:00.002Z

From The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy, which I've just finished

"...that Australian girl got his goat first thing this morning...she'd infuriated Robert no end...looking at the front page of Robert's newspaper, saying how scary she found all this terrorist stuff. Robert told her London had lived with terrorism for years, floods, riots, bombs, the lot. It wasn't news...
'Of course it was terrible for the people actually hurt, the bombs here...But how many did that actually affect? In their day to day life? The families, friends or injured, I grant you, but not everyone, not really. Look, after those bombs up in town, half my bloody customers were in here, carrying on about how it was all different now, but at the end of the same time they were picking up nice clean clothes for a do somewhere, or a job interview, and getting on with it all just the same. If it was true that everything had changed, they wouldn't be haring off for a fancy weekend away, would they? They would have been as changed as they said they were...
'And then you get some kid...going on about someone else's grief as if it's her own, but it isn't. She's stealing other people's grief. Like there's not enough to go around.'

Principles of good design

2009-05-29T16:32:00.002Z

Visibility - user can tell what state the device is in and the alternatives for action

A good conceptual model - designer provides a good conceptual model for the user with consistency in presentation of operations and results and a coherent, consistent system image

Good mappings - it's possible to determine the relationships between actions and results, between the controls and their effects, and between the system state and what is visible

Feedback - use receives full and continuous feedback about the result of actions

From The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

Patriarchy?

2009-05-28T19:25:00.002Z

From this week's LRB:

"...men, to a remarkable degree, seem to have internalised those norms, playing at a 'dominant' role that forced them to do pretty much what their wives wanted.

"'Cecil explains that..back then 'the man was always the governor', while his wife agrees and then interjects, seemingly out of nowhere: "Pardon me, but piffle'".

From review by "Going up to heaven" review by Susan Pedersen.

Pics from the Ots

2009-05-14T21:36:00.002Z

Pics of Third sector minister Kevin Brennan performing with Cabinet Office civil servants for red nose day, and view from Admiralty Arch during the snow earlier this year.

How to make anything

2009-01-09T23:24:00.002Z

"First , get a clear notion of what you desire to accomplish, and then in all probability you will succeed in doing it...Keep a sharp look-out upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can do without; put to yourself the question, 'What business has it to be there?' Avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible."

(Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), engineer and entrepreneur, quoted in James Hamilton's London Lights from James Nasmyth - Engineer: an Autobiography edited by Samuel Smiles.)

Understanding-economy-simplicity: how to go about approaching anything.

Local activism

2008-03-16T15:41:00.002Z

One of the things that I've been meaning to do since I started in this job is to get organised about supporting our local groups. In my original interview for policy co-ordinator I made a big thing about how fantastic it was to have a network of local groups and contacts. But since I've actually been in charge of that network, I've done very little to develop it or to really support it.

But I'm hoping that's going to change now we have a full staff team in place, and this week I went along to Hackney the first meeting of the new branch there. Like other of our branches, they met in a local pub (the Pembury) which I like as it's part of that continuity of voluntary association that goes back to beyond the eighteenth century (and is kind of related to the phd) where pubs played a role as the location for people to get together and try and change things themselves. However, we were right in the middle of the pub so it wasn't a great location if you actually wanted to have a good debate. But the people involved are really keen and have already been campaigning at the weekend for a borough-wide 20mph limit. The meeting also provided good evidence of how those involved in one group are often involved in many more. So with this meeting, we had people who were already active in Hackney Cyclists, local disability organisations and connected to the civic society. It is easy to label these people as "the usual suspects" but these are the people who do have some initiative and can make the connections between groups and can claim a wider legitimacy through those connections.

These people are also the ones who can galvanise wider support and get that wider "armchair" member support. I was reminded of this at the training day we organise yesterday with CTC and the Campaign for Better Transport for our local activists. Rod King from the Warrington Cycle Campaign was talking about their successes snd the way in which they work, with about 10 activists backed up by 250 members. Not everyone has to be active, but the wider membership can help give legitimacy to their work. The day also made me think about how much of the discourse about the voluntary sector only really talks about, on the one hand, big voluntary organisations who deliver services or who run big national campaigns, and on the other hand the smaller community organisations who work at a local level to improve areas (and only the ones in more deprived areas are of interest to academics or policy makers). But this ignores lots of voluntary activism by members of local groups of national organisations, like Friends of the Earth, the WI or Citizens Advice. These associations are vital in linking national policy with what is happening at a local level, and government strategy should recognise this more.

Olympic week

2008-03-09T11:58:00.007Z

This week seems to have been a bit Olympic (in between work on padded lamp posts).

Cabe's away day for their enablers at Leyton Orient on Wednesday included presentations on the development of the Olympic site and what supposed to come after, with the paving needed for the games coming out and then a move to make it more like a park, with housing development from both sides then coming in to mingle with the parkland to create Elysian fields. Or something. Though Simon Barnett, who's our representative on an Olympic advisory board, says that there are concerns that the legacy plans are being scaled back and the parkland is being shrunk too much.

Cabe's awayday also involved a tour on a minicoach around the Olympic site, for which we needed to present our passport and were warned that on no account were we allowed to take photos of the site for copyright reasons. All that you can really see at the moment is just the work to essentially flatten everything on site, clean up the contaminated soil with big soil washing machines, and some of the more major infrastructure changes, such as a new embankment of the Lea so that barges can be used to bring in material (and therefore reduce some of the impact of lorry trips on the surrounding area). There is a real corporate control of the presentation of the plans, with much emphasis on the green sustainability of the development (for instance they intend to reuse on site 90% of the materials from demolishing existing structures). Though demanding 3,000 cars and dedicated lanes for the IOC doesn't quite fit with this.

In contrast to the presentation on Thursday, Pete and I went to a talk at the Museum of London by Peter Marshall on Thursday. His view of the Olympics was much more cynical - his talk showing pictures of a changing East London implied that the Olympics will end up similar to the docklands developments with flats for the rich while those living outside the new developments get left behind (though he did criticise the docklands developments for lacking an overall plan - but then implied criticism for the Olympics for being the opposite and having too controlling a plan for the area).

I think like most Londoners I have a pretty ambivalent view about the Olympics in 2012, based around thinking it's all a bit of a waste of money but keen (through work) to make the most of the opportunity. The appeal for lots of people (particularly government departments and quangos) is that the 2012 games has two things that make organisations want to get involved and try and develop their own plans to add to it - firstly a nice clear target date in five years time, and secondly the awareness that there's a lot of cash going to be spent to make sure it happens and that other activities get linked into it. Which explains why we'll be having a number of meetings on related plans on this at work next week...

Inside and outside TfL

2008-02-26T19:47:00.003Z

Today we published research we've conducted on how shoppers feel about when Oxford St was closed to traffic before Christmas. As a result of the survey, we're now calling for Oxford St to be permanently pedestrianised. This is something that's been talked about for ages but has yet to happen and TfL aren't keen on revisiting the issue.

Also today, London Living Streets had its quarterly liaison meeting with TfL's surface transport division. It's a good example of balancing outsider campaigning (publishing research and seeking media coverage) to pressure TfL with insider lobbying through regular catch-up meetings. I think we're striking the right balance and not just rolling over in agreement. Through the meetings we do get to be better informed in what we're calling for and can achieve some things. But the decision about pedestrianising Oxford St is always going to be a political decision rather than one for officials. Which explains why Simon is also attending the New West End Company's hustings with the Mayoral candidates tonight.

Meeting the new CEO

2008-02-12T20:44:00.000Z

Our new CEO came in yesterday to meet a couple of the managers, as a first step in introducing him to his new role. The two areas he thought needed attention were our communications and our relationship with our local groups. So it's good that those are already two areas that we're already working on improving. A lot of organisations can get hung up on policing their identity and lose all sense of innovation and interestingness about what they do. But there's a lot more we can do to try and feel like one organisation and to create the right impression - a bit like dressing in the right clothes for the occasion. At the moment, we can be a bit too much of an ill fitting anorak but I'd be concerned if we became too much of a pinstripe suit...

The other danger is that we become too focussed and therefore too boring. Since I started I've tried to narrow down our focus to "walkability" but the danger is that we so stifle creativity and the ability to try new things that we become really boring and no fun to work for. So lets hope we still have time for trying silly ideas and classic voluntary sector (and Lib Dem) silly photo stunts.

Meeting MPs

2008-02-05T18:16:00.000Z

Haven't done much on my phud recently so a bit of diversification...

So today my colleague Lucy and I met with Norman Baker, who's been the Lib Dem transport spokesman since NIck Clegg became leader. In my experience of meeting MPs they're either completely bored and uninterested (like James Purnell), distracted by what else is happening that day (like Norman Baker today) or else actually very polite and engaged in what you've come to talk to them about (like Vera Baird).

Anyway, today's meeting was of the high speed variety though we tried to get our views across on the local transport bill and 20mph, and we're getting a PQ put down about the Manual for Streets. But the meeting brought up the problem we face in trying to improve streets for pedestrians and encouraging more walking, in that for most politicians what we say is either motherhood and apple pie and therefore not really for them to act on (like improved street design or improved walking links to public transport), or else it'll just never happen (often because of perceptions of the views of car drivers) - as with some of the demands for 20mph limits.

Which leaves us with the challenge of turning around those perceptions and demonstrating how government action impacts on what we're talking about, and how starting with walking and pedestrians is necessary when considering wider transport issues. But it was a first meeting so let's hope we can keep talking...

And as we headed out, the masses from the Campaign for Better Transport arrived to get their message across in their allotted time.

Finally...(part 2)

2007-09-08T16:53:00.000Z

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...

2007-09-06T19:19:00.000Z

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...

Bourdieu

2007-06-29T17:14:00.000Z

The Forms of Capital by Pierre Bourdieu
* existence of capital in various forms means that life is not random and prevents people from being able to dramatically change their social status instantly, it's not the case that "every soldier has a marshal's baton in his knapsack"
* cultural capital can exist in three forms - embodied (in "the form of longlasting dispositions of the mind and body"), objectified (cultural goods) and institutionalised (eg educational qualifications)
* he defines social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition - or in other words, to membership in a group - which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a "credential" which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word.
* relationships may also "may also be socially instituted and guaranteed by the application of a common name (the name of a family, a class, or a tribe or of a school, a party, etc.) and by a whole set of instituting acts designed simultaneously to form and inform those who undergo them; in this case, they are more or less really enacted and so maintained and reinforced, in exchanges"
* "the network of relationships is the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term, i.e., at transforming contingent relations, such as those of neighborhood, the workplace, or even kinship, into relationships that are at once necessary and elective, implying durable obligations subjectively felt (feelings of gratitude, respect, friendship, etc.) or institutionally guaranteed (rights)."
* social capital seems for Bourdieu to be consciously pursued, where those who are "richly endowed with capital" (of various forms) are sought after for their social capital
* he also points out the role of individuals or elites to speak and act for a group with joint social capital, and perhaps in policing the boundaries of that group.

He suggests that some of the value of cultural capital is its scarcity value. Is this true of social capital where it can be the number and quality of links and the ways in which those links can access other forms of capital and access to resources (Bourdieu says "the volume of social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends one the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected".) But is there also a scarcity value of social capital? Does someone with high social status benefit from limiting his or her links, or is there a benefit in extending them to all and sundry?

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

2007-06-03T18:27:00.000Z

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.

Male/female and institutional/non-institutional social capital

2007-06-02T11:12:00.000Z

Marjorie McIntosh's chapter in Patterns of Social Capital highlights gender differences in social capital (based on early modern England and mid-C20 Nigeria, which also highlights issues around the role of institutions in affecting social capital.

In terms of gender differences, these seem basically to be:
*men - lateral and vertical ties, more based around institutions, can be seen to lead to economic and political growth, perhaps more portable to diffferent locations, male access to political, economic and cultural capital means that they are less reliant on social capital (and maybe therefore easier to pick and choose and find more "getting on" social capital?), and more likely to give to the poor through charities or poor-relief officials
* women - more based in a particular (geographical) group, has a role in bringing up the next generation (though this isn't really picked up in the chapter), more likely to give directly to the poor, more reliant on social capital as lack of access to other forms of capital, and more used a defence against the prospect of losing means of income.

She concludes that using a more sociological, political science or economic approach may miss out on women's use of social capital, and more anthropological approach may be more useful. (favouring Bourdieu over Putnam and Coleman's emphasis on outcomes from social capital and how social capital leads to wider social and political development).

McIntosh also discusses the role of institutions in social capital, mainly in relation to highlighting gender differences (for instance she says that men's social capital gained through institutions was portable and provided learning that could be applied elsewhere) though she also points out the role of what you might call more "compulsory organisations" (eg parish bodies) as well as voluntary organisations, which she feels has been overemphasised in much of the work on social capital. She also discusses how SC can provoke hostility and division as well as social integration (the "darkside" of SC). It would be interesting to consider the extent to which institutions give a stronger ideological or cultural base to social capital, as well as influencing rituals of behaviour, or narratives about people's involvement or behaviour.

Finally, she concludes that "laterally focused systems of social capital" are more attrative when a previously stable society is becoming more dynamic, but that the attraction of lateral SC diminishes as they become a hindrance to individuals seeking to take advantage of the new society.

Some historians write about social capital

2007-05-28T14:08:00.000Z

...and most completely ignore the subject or else don't understand what it's about. Well, at least some of them in Patterns of Social Capital (ed Robert Rotberg), which claims to "advance the study of social capital across chronological and geographical space".

Some of them either just write standard articles about their own subject with some random references to social capital or Putnam throw in without bothering to say what they mean by social capital (or as the intro says, "Brucher, Muir, Grew and Rosenband test generalizations, as most historians do, against empirical details over longer or shorter episodes of time").

Others just regard social capital as pretty well the same thing as civil society/civic engagement/public sphere without really bothering to define them (see Mary Ryan's Civil Society as Democratic Practice: North American Cities During the Nineteenth Century), or else decide that social capital is basically cultural capital so let's just talk about cultural capital instead (see Raymond Grew's Finding Social Capital: The French Revolution in Italy) - though Jack Greene does more usefully discuss how social capital needs to be located within cultural capital to look at how others can inherit advantages associated with this (in his article relating it to colonial British America).

Generally, there seems a deep suspicion of the concept of social capital among some of the historians writing in the collection:

Some of the essays attack Putnam's description of Italian history, particularly his description of the origins of higher social capital in Northern Italy resulting from republican guild associations, and therefore are suspicious of whether a theoretical concept can be built around this mistaken analysis (and also of guild based association in other countries - see Rosenband's Social Capital and the Early Industrial Revolution)

There is also suspicion about a concept used by political scientists and economists, eg:
* Greene says that historians are "far less concerned with how to attain the specific goals that modern society deems desirable" and that social scientists' definition of social capital is "too narrow, too instrumental, too Whiggish, and too Western". It needs to be applicable across a wide variety of times and spaces (I would have it was but nevermind) and that it must be "redefined and expanded to include not just traditions of civil interaction but the entire range of institutions, practices, devices, and learned behaviours that enable collectivities and individuals to render physical spaces productive and social and cultural spaces agreeable".
* For Mary Ryan, "'social capital' might ring pleasantly in the ears of social scientists, but to some humanists it emits a discordant economistic sound"
* Elisabeth Clemens regards it as a metaphor, using financial imagery, but that metaphors can be dangerous because they can "assert multiple dimensions of similarity" which may be misleading. In social capital's case, she argues that it can lead to seeing social capital as as portable or fungible as financial capital, whereas it is much more firmly rooted and embedded in networks.

However, there are also a number of very useful analyses of social capital in different contexts, and also how using social capital as an analytical concept in historical studies needs to address a number of important issues. More on these in a bit...

Charity, philanthropy and reform

2007-05-28T10:16:00.000Z

Notes from Charity, philanthropy and reform, ed Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes

From Intro by Cunningham
6 themes for further study of charity and philanthropy are:
* changing perceptions of poverty (esp with urbanisation and manufacturing)
* "politics of charity" - states and cities prided themselves on their charitable efforts, which lent legitimacy to often fragile structures of power
* gendering of charity - women and (religious) charity, men and (secular) philanthropy
* need to avoid simply studying organisations because they leave records - need to look at informal giving and private charity
* studies have looked at Christian western Europe, and haven't looked at how Islam might have influenced Europe
* past focus on donors - what about recipients ("charity was a reciprocal relationship and encoded appropriate modes oof behaviour on donor and recipient")

From State, Church and Voluntarism in European Welfare, 1690-1850 (Joanna Innes)
* lots of complaints in early C19 about settlement laws needed with local poor relief, but hardly any mention about shifting it to national taxes (because of lack of effective expenditure control?)
* needed local elites to run poor relief (lack of local elites in Ireland meant more difficult to adapt English system)
* dissenting groups and the state - "they were likely to treasure their independence, and to be interested in building up charitable resources and enlarging their welfare role primarily as a means to protect and reinforce that. It was not uncommon for dissenting groups' special efforts to attract wider notice and for them to be held up as models of community self-sufficiency" (eg French protestants in Switzerland in 1770s)
* role of charities in poor relief was attractive to states, in terms of both cash and people - they could do things the state could not, they could get money that people were unwilling to give to the state, and it helped in terms of legitimation

From Head v heart? Voluntary Associations and Charity Organisation in England, c 1700-1850 (Michael JD Roberts)
* good on rise of more scientific charity - eg giving was no longer a duty but was "an act of mercy peformed as a result of morally refined sensitivity in the giver to the sight or knowledge of human suffering". Giving was voluntary both legally and morally so it was "reasonable for the donor to expect the recipient to conform to certain continuing standards of deservingness" - mainly to restore and retain a self-supporting positionin society by being in the labour market
* problems of charities trying to monitor and evaluate deservingness of charitable applicants - difficult to keep doing and difficult to do on any large scale
* religious charities were pulled in two directions - professionalising and proseltyzing

From Transforming the Nation and the Child: Philanthropy in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and England, c1780-c1850 (Jeroen Dekker)
* uses concept of social marginality, with poor at periphery of society compared to mainstream, with intermediate area of fragility where people could sink into periphery
* like others, contrasts "philanthropy" (utilitarian) with "charity" (Christian) and also growth in C19 of mix which was "Christian philanthropy"
* traditional Christian charity aimed to make life more humane for those with marginal standard of living, but modern philanthropy "not only aimed at making life for the poor and the marginals more humane, but also at eliminating the marginals as a specific social group"
* Catholic charity was more reliant on clergy congregations, compared to Protestants with more individual action and where semi-independent bodies played a role

From Religion, Philanthropy and the State in late 18th and early 19th Century Ireland (Maria Luddy)
* In Catholic eyes, all Protestant philantrhopy was eventually to become tainted with the stain of proseltism, precluding any interdenominational attempts at co-operation for the benefit of the poor and needy in Irish societ" - which was presumably brought as an attitude to England by Irish immigrants

back with the Internet

2007-05-08T20:50:00.000Z

Have been rubbish at updating this for the past couple of months, mainly because we've been moving house and BT took forever to sort out removing tags from our new phone line. Anyway, it's all sorted now so should be more in a bit. In the meantime, here's a photo from the medieval fancy dress wedding we went to last week in Cornwall. Photos with fancy dress are on flickr.

Neighbouring

2007-02-28T19:16:00.000Z

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

2007-02-23T15:36:00.000Z

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...

2007-02-23T14:05:00.000Z

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...

2007-02-18T16:24:00.000Z

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

2007-02-17T18:06:00.000Z

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

2007-02-08T16:24:00.001Z

DSC00390
Originally uploaded by Rick Hebditch.

Cold weather+lots of washing drying=misted glass

Historians use of "social control"

2007-02-08T14:50:00.000Z

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

2007-02-02T11:23:00.000Z

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

2007-02-01T18:54:00.000Z

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

RJ Morris on voluntary societies

2007-01-22T17:56:00.000Z

Roberts talks about there being three framing narratives for the discussion of moral reformers and voluntary societies - seeing it as an aspect of the development of capitalist industrial society; a "civil society" approach looking at the emergence of a "social sphere"; and one looking at its role in terms of mediating or resolving conflict, which he associated with R J Morris (and Brian Harrison?). This third narrative is one that is particularly useful when looking at the role of immigrant charities as a mediating space between host society (and power structures and elites) and immigrant communities (ie bridging and linking social capital).

Morris' Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites" includes various useful discussions in relation to this. He sees voluntary societies as mediating spaces which could help the "organization of consent" and in which different groups could come together to achieve (or at least try to achieve) some common aim but in which they could avoid the resolution of inherent contradictions between different groups of the middle class. These contradictions could be a barrier for state or local action, where the need to allocate official resources could lead to conflict (eg "evangelical and utilitarian competition for middle-class attention took place between rival voluntary societies, not as a disruptive contest for the resources of the state"). One might also use this to look at whether the notion of charity (or voluntary action) as inherently a good thing (a "public benefit") could mean that "reactionaries" could come to support what might be seen as a "progressive" cause. Was this true for immigrant charities?

Morris also places the development of voluntary societies in the context of the creation of a middle class mission and identity. They asserted their authority within the new society and sought to defend their place in that society by their voluntary endeavours on behalf of the whole community. But the middle class was also widely varied and involvement allowed for hierarchies within the middle class, with an elite assuming certain roles and titles in a system that ensures outside trust and confidence in the society, encouraged participation and sought to maximise donations ("the need for financial support, and in many cases for men of property and probity to act as trustees, in whom the property of the society could be vested, meant that patronage was welcomed by many members of lower status").

"The organization of consent which they continually sought was not only the consent of the subordinate classes to a beneficial domination but the consent of fragments of a potential middle class to cooperate with each other in seeking and sustaining this domination".

On the effect of voluntary societies on the working class, Morris like Roberts does not come down conclusively on one side or the other. He talks about late nineteenth century clerks and lower middle class as symbolizing the mixture of "defence and proud independence" that these societies sought but he also discusses the way in which the working class was able to take "items from the cultural package" offered them and to turn them to their own advantage "without compromising their own class identity or interest".

Capitalist models for charities

2007-01-21T13:04:00.000Z

Charities could be seen to have adopted two aspects of capitalist organisation - the voluntary society as joint stock company and the division of labour within the charity.

Charities set up in the eighteenth century and after are often seen to have adopted the joint stock model in their development as subscribing charities (eg Roberts: "investors in works of charity were to be entitled to make their decisions on the basis of full information as in any other area of market choice"). But Morris says that the major organisational sources were the non-conformist chapel and the pub (Southwark Living Streets meets monthly in the Royal Oak Tavern in Tabard St). So is this true for Jewish and Irish charities? Which organisational source did they look to?

On the division of labour, charities were often an attempt to reinforce direct social relations that were being weakened in the face of the separation of classes in work environments and the spatial separation of rich and poor. So charities aimed at being volunteer led to create that contact and to reflect ideals of voluntary service. But their history tends to often demonstrate a weakness to keep this ideal in the face of variable enthusiasm by volunteers and the difficulty for volunteers to make the detailed decisions needed. So for instance the Mendicity Society was forced to employ a full-time manager and introduce a standard work test. So even charities could not avoid the division of labour in their own work.

Reasons for formation or action by voluntary societies

2007-01-21T12:35:00.000Z

Simple crisis followed by response? - eg Sierra Leone project response to "the black poor", Polish refugees in 1830s, fever hospital in Leeds set up following 1799-1800 typhus outbreak, etc. But (quoting RJ Morris) what these incidents did was "concentrate anxieties about disease, street begging, radicalism and poverty which already existed. Such incidents provided a motive for selecting from the variety of ideas and examples of action by voluntary societies which were current at any given time." (eg ideas about promoting settlement in Sierra Leone were already current as the black poor crisis developed).

Morris quotes the comparison between towns which encouraged the development of new societies and how examples of other towns were used to justify action (evidence based policy making?). This was also true with different denominations and ethnic groups (see Prochaska on different female visiting societies). Immigrant groups could also be used to highlight "mainstream" attitudes and actions - eg "if even the Jews are so charitable that they have set up a charity to...".

Definitions of charity / voluntary societies (ongoing)

2007-01-21T12:12:00.000Z

The posting on "moral reform" mentions a C19 distinctinction between moral reform organisations and charities (the original quote in Roberts is from a temperance society member) but others didn't see a difference - eg Edward Baines in 1843 lumps "mechanics institutes, literary societies, circulating libraries, youth's guardian societies, friendly societies, temperance societies, medical charities, clothing societies, benevolent and district visiting societies" as all bodies "for the diffusion of knowledge and for the dispensing of every kind of good" (quoted in RJ Morris Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites).

RJ Morris also has a useful also has a useful definition of voluntary societies as "organized groups of people formed to further a common interest. Membership was neither mandatory nor acquired by birth".

Should the definition in my study be "voluntary society" rather than "charity"?

The moral reform tradition

2007-01-20T15:33:00.000Z

Roberts (in Making English Morals) talks about the creation of a "moral reform tradition" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The modern inheritors are probably those organisations working on behaviour change campaigns (like Living Streets' Walk to School and Walking Works campaigns. In the nineteenth century this was seen as linked to but separate from more direct charity, a division that still continues to some extent.

In the nineteenth century, these were more likely to be campaigns for observation of the Sabbath, to stop animal cruelty (or at least working class animal cruelty), or to promote domestic life rather than the attraction of gin palaces or other distractions about trying to get the working class to accept and adjust to market values of self-control and self-reliance but was also a reaction to the unsettling nature of the market economy and its ability to corrupt (particularly for those whose viewpoint was more evangelical Christian). It was a form of "compensatory investment in ccultural stabilisation on behalf of the class most self-consciously 'implicated'" in the rise of the market. "Middle class society depended for its collective peace of mind on being able to recognise a limit to the legitimate operation of market forces and to patrol that limit on behalf of all classes".

Roberts also discusses the effect of these moral reform organisations in ways which I want to explore in relation to charities helping immigrants at this time. He concludes that the effects of technology, work routines, urban commercial leisure activity, a more stable economy and more reliable wage and employment prospects resulted the rise of "working class respectability" but that "volunteer experimental effort at the very least eased the transition from a predominantly rural face-to-face society to a predominantly urban, class segrated one". He also says that these groups also gave an opportunity to working people to "transform themselves" from being the objects of moral reformers to being its practitioners.

As well as the effect on those who were the targets of their work, those involved also built for themselves a sense of community which helped create both a middle class cultural mission and a cross-class, cross-regional "national opinion". It will be interested to see the extent to which the actions of those involved in Jewish or Catholic/Irish organisations helped create "Jewish" or "Catholic" opinion.

Psychological reasons for individual motivation (ongoing list)

2007-01-20T15:23:00.000Z

Some thoughts on individuals' motivation for donating time or money to charity:

"psychic strain" caused by recently acquired or precarious social rank (from Robert's Making English Morals)

Charities and the Poor Law (Alan Kidd book)

2007-01-16T18:08:00.000Z

Just finished reading Alan Kidd's book State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth Century England, which I should have read at the beginning of all this reading rather than one year in. It's a pretty useful overview. The main points for my studies are:

not having a teleological approach to welfare to avoid seeing everything as anticipating the welfare state leading to too much emphasis being placed by historians on the Poor Law (but if you're looking at immigrant communities in this period you're unlikely to do so as they were largely outside the Poor Law's remit)

that charity was placed somewhere between the safety net of the Poor Law and self-help organisations (like friendly societies) and the support of family, friends and neighbours (though again, this might be less true for immigrants who could not access the Poor Law and who might have more difficulties accessing support from kin and connections - ie less social capital - so might therefore be more reliant on charity if they were in need. They would also need to locate themselves very near friends and family if they were to get help from them in an era before public transport and rapid communications. And high population movements "interfered with kinship networks" so that there was a need for stability in an area before kinship systems could work. Which ties in with the suggestion that immigrants would tend to live in areas which allowed them “to strengthen internal ties for self-support as well as to start to create external links with their host society” (from Laura Vaughan and Alan Penn on immigrant quarters in Leeds and Liverpool. See “Jewish Immigrant Settlement Patterns in Manchester and Leeds 1881” in Urban Studies, Vol 43, no 3, 653-671, March 2006)

the link between evangelical and "classical political economy" ideas on charity - the comparison with immigrant charities would help highlight this, and it's interesting to see how they are affected by these ideas (eg Jewish Board of Guardian's use of language of the Poor Law) - and that all welfare (charity and Poor Law) was a gift and recipients should not expect to be entitled to it

refers to the idea of those applying for charitable help getting used to the "theatre of charity" and acting the right part (see Mandle, the Uses of Charity) though he doesn't explore the ways in which this might be internalised into day to day behaviour (check Goffman's Presentation of Self)

the role of friendly societies in creating and reinforcing a shared culture (rituals and tests for membership - Gorsky's fictive kin) and supportive social network but lower middle class distate for this and preference for chequebook style societies

role of women in financial management of household and "supportive and regulative" social networks

and he also says that welfare systems are a "cultural construct": discuss

Lascelles - linking social capital as prerequisite to access charity

2006-12-17T18:17:00.000Z

(notes from Lascelles' chapter on charity in Victorian England, edited by G M Young)

"Influence and friends" were necessary for many people if they were to access help from charity - beneficiaries had to compete for the interest of subscribers. For instance, admission to charity hospitals were through letters obtained from subscribers. This suggests that good social capital (linking social capital?) was important prerequisite of any help and any transfer of resources from rich to poor. Did this reinforce the way that charity primarily helped the "respectable" poor rather than the lowest "underclass"? Did it also encourage linking social capital and a strategy where those who might be poor would seek to develop relationships with those who had more power and money? This could also have had positive benefits for those who were successful, beyond simply the ability to access resources from charity in times of need. It could also have led to other opportunities (eg employment opportunities) and adoption of behaviours which could have longer-term benefits. The need to present narratives and arguments as part of the competition for support would also surely have led to some internalisation of those narratives, which again could have reinforced certain behaviours. (did Jewish charity on this model play a role in the embouregoisement of Jews in London in the first part of the nineteenth century?)

Lascelles also discussed motives for charity, generally having a benevolent view of Victorian benevolence, saying that a genuine desire to improve the condition of the poor was stronger motive than fear of rising discontent, and quoting the fact that benevolence continued strongly after the fear of revolution had passed and with a rise in state welfare support. He also claims that "there can be no doubt that the poor had to rely more on charity than on public funds", which Susannah Morris would probably disagree with (see her paper at VAHS seminar on charitable resources compared to the Poor Law.

Patronage and charity

2006-12-09T12:25:00.000Z

(Notes and ideas from JM Bourne's Patronage and Society in Nineteenth Century England)

The relationship between patronage and charity/poor relief was close. For instance, the New Poor Law opened up new opportunities for patronage associated with the appointment of national and local officers. Presumably this would also be true of appointments as officers of charities.

For the elite, particuarly the landed class, patronage was a "reward, an obligation and a butress" of their position. But was this true for elites within immigrant communities at this time? Did they follow the pattern of the indigenous elite or were their patronage networks and obligations different? For instance was it informed by different religious beliefs and a less secure position in society compared to the English elite?

In a rapidly changing society which seemed in danger of falling into an "anarchy of competitive individualism", patronage helped mitigate the danger of social conflict. However, patronage networks tended not to extend as far as the working class and the poor were more reliant on the Poor Law or charity. Was this also true for immigrant communities? Did closer ties and identification with each other as fellow Jews, Irish or Germans mean that there was a stronger sense of obligation on the part of the elite?

Patronage has been accused of being a form of social control built on power dependency. But Bourne rejects the extent of this by pointing out that "the pursuit of patronage was not a central working class concern" although it was more true of the middle class where it helped establish a "common area of shared valued which would not otherwise exist". Using this argument, you could also argue that patronage networks played a role in the the making of the English Middle Class, alongside charity and other associational movements (so that middle class identity is more of a cultural/associational construct rather than defined through economic relationships). Bourne also says that "far from seeking to perpetuate a socially hostile environment many patrons were at the centre of the struggle to ameliorate it through legislative enactment, educational improvement and philanthropy".

But charities for immigrant groups (and other social structures) were means by which help could be accessed and could be seen as forms of patronage (Bourne doesn't really regard charity as a form of patronage being more interested in more individually based forms, although the rise of voting charities where donors would have a direct say in who received help can surely be seen as a form of such patronage). Given that immigrant communities were smaller and where class divisions were affected by ethnic identifications, were immigrant charities more clearly part of patronage networks?

Social or moral entrepreneurs

2006-12-08T15:00:00.000Z

I'm currently reading Making English Morals by MJD Roberts, which has some interesting points about the moral reform associations of the early nineteenth century which have parallels with today. One of them is about "moral entrepreneurs" of this period (in this case the campaigning magistrate Patrick Colquhoun) who had "a vested interest in creating a market for his own expertise". Which sounds quite a lot like some of today's social entrepreneurs beloved of many politicians.

There's also some good points about the crossover between more direct charities and wider moral reform organisations in developing a middle class consciousness and the desire to "nudge" the urban working class to take on middle class values of domesticity (see Tony Blair on parenting), deferred gratification (see the Tory "tosser within" ad) and prudent foresight (see Labour Minister James Purnell).