Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Social capital and the business of the middle class: Rebecca Marsh and Daniel Reidpath hear echoes of nineteenth-century etiquette in social capital rhetoric.

Article Excerpt
Social capital has been taken up with fervour by local, state, commonwealth and international governments. It has found favour among the 'neo-' politicians: neo-liberals, neo-conservatives and New Labour, and within international institutions like the World Bank. So accepted has it become in government in Australia that measures of social capital now form part of the officially collected statistics at both a local and national level.

Despite benign and popular appearances to the contrary, social capital can be seen as a manifestation of class that allows government to abrogate its social responsibilities and thereby entrenches existing social inequalities. In short, it serves to preserve the cultural dominance of the middle class.

Pioneered by sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, social capital was popularised in the 1990s by the American sociologist, Robert Putnam. 'Social capital' came to mean the ties or relationships between people in groups characterised by the mutual trust and reciprocity that lead to material and social advantage. It emphasised the centrality of social networks, which facilitated the building of trust and co-operation between people for their mutual benefit. Social capital appeared to offer the middle way between the laissez faire individual freedom of the political right and the structured, economically determined social position anticipated by the left.

Despite the apparent novelty of the idea of social capital expressed in its popular adoption by government and social commentators, it is not a neutral intellectual notion about social relationships. Rather, it operates as a class discourse. Specifically, it draws on two related discourses: one about middle-class culture, the other about commercial enterprise. Both of these are necessarily and inextricably bound together within the discourse of capitalism.

Bourdieu outlined the idea that the adoption and transmission of particular tastes, habits and sensibilities from generation to generation are instrumental in reproducing class position. This can be seen in the inculcation by middle-class parents into their children the academic aspirations and language skills necessary to succeed in the school system--itself a tool of middle class culture that privileges the attainments and dispositions of its own.

Social capital can, similarly, be seen as representing a particular set of historical (middle-) class preferences and habits relating to the formation of social networks for material benefit and upward social mobility. The social significance of networks for material benefit has its origins in the very beginnings of middle-class culture....

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!