BNP

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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)

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...

Bourdieu

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

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

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

...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

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