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

back with the Internet

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

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

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...

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...

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).