|
Article Excerpt
THE IDEA BEHIND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL CAPITAL is straightforward enough: having good networks of family, friends and acquaintances is essential to quality of life. These networks increase people's capacities to manage their lives, from getting paid employment, surviving crises, to living well. Without good networks, people have a harder time managing day to day and getting ahead in the labour market or in their communities. The concept of social capital has been taken up by social policy analysts who say that building people's stock of social capital should be a policy goal. Yet while the basic idea behind social capital appears uncomplicated, putting it into practice has proven to be very complicated. Social capital research has largely oversimplified which conditions foster such networks (usually affluence), who does the work of maintaining social networks (usually women) and which networks are valued (usually job-related networks). Failure to take account of systemic inequalities leaves much of the social capital literature sex-, race- and class-blind. More importantly, its assumptions ignore women's responsibility for social reproduction and how that determines the kind of networks they can access. If social capital is chosen as a tool for social policy development in Canada, these biases have profound implications for gender equality.
Finding the Social in the Capital
Social policy discourses since the 1990s include variations on notions of the "social": social cohesion, social inclusion and exclusion, social economy and social capital, to name but a few (Graefe, 2004). The use of the concept social capital has recently emerged as a central policy approach for the Canadian government. (1) While heralded as a potentially critical tool for social policy, a cross-disciplinary, widely agreed-upon definition of the concept is elusive and its parameters are murky. It holds out the possibility of recognizing the "social" in an era when, until recently, the "economic" had subsumed social questions, but it does not consider important structural questions about gender, class and race, as well as other inequalities. (2)
Since the mid-1990s, propelled by the popular reception of Robert Putnam's (Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti, 1993; Putnam, 2000) studies of the rise and decline of civic engagement in the United States and Italy, the concept of social capital has gained increasing prominence in a host of disciplines. (3) There are numerous excellent summaries of the debates surrounding this concept (see, for example, Fine, 2001; Harriss, 2002). Since the late 1990s, the concept has been embraced by international agencies such as the World Bank, the OECD and the United Nations, and has been the subject of critical study in Europe, the United States and, more recently, Canada. (4) It is currently the subject of considerable quantitative and some qualitative research. It has been referred to as "the missing link" (World Bank, 1998) in development and "a new paradigm" (UN, 2004).
There is no broad consensus on the definition or application of social capital. The World Bank's definition, which is widely cited, states that social capital can be understood as "the institutions, the relationships, the attitudes and values that govern interactions among people and contribute to economic and social development" (1998: 1). The Canadian Policy Research Initiative defines it as "... the networks of social relations that may provide individuals and groups with access to resources and supports" (2005: 6). Trust, measures of trust, the presence of support networks and vertical cross-class networks are important components of the concept. Thus, social capital is a resource, usually held collectively but redeemed individually, that allows people to get by and, hopefully, to get ahead (see Field, 2004). Social capital can be summed up as "it's not what you know, it's who you know" (Woolcock, 2001).
Social capital has been described as consisting of three different types of networks (Putnam, 1998; Narayan, 1999; Woolcock, 1998). (5) The first is bonding social capital which binds the members of a group together, also termed social support (Briggs, 1998; 2004). This kind of social capital is characterized by strong ties among closely related people, and is associated with survival. Bonding social capital is most closely associated with family and with women. The second is bridging social capital which connects people from different (secondary) social groups, also termed social leverage (Briggs, 2004). This kind of capital is associated with mobility and, in economic terms, is associated with "getting ahead." The third is linking social capital, which ties relatively weak and relatively powerful people together, such as patron-client relationships. This kind of capital is ostensibly vertical and ties the poor and other marginalized groups with "the capacity to leverage resources, ideas and information from formal institutions beyond the community" (Woolcock, 2001: 13).
One of the impressive aspects of the social capital concept is that it has been taken up seriously in a number of disciplines (van Staveren, 2002). It thus holds out the possibility of incorporating a range of perspectives, but to date appears most often to sit within rather rigid economic approaches or within discussions of collective action and democratic engagement in politics (some notable exceptions include Lin, 2000; Fine, 2001; Adkins, 2005). It holds appeal for progressive thinkers who see an opportunity to re-embed the social economy, and to claim space for bolstering intimate and community social relations. It also appeals to conservatives who are interested in charity-based social supports, and wish to see individuals and communities, rather than the state, providing solutions to persistent problems such as poverty or social exclusion. It also holds appeal for neo-liberal states that seek to bolster social engagement without addressing structural issues such as changes in employment forms and decreases in social service expenditure. The apparent versatility of the concept has led critics to suggest that it runs the risk of being all things to all people and thus not a practicable concept (Briggs, 2004). With these cautions in mind, the concept of social capital does recognize the centrality of informal caring relationships (especially of the "bonding" variety) to the quality of individual and group life; the life force of these informal relationships is often women's unpaid labour and therefore social capital holds some potential for more women-friendly social policy development.
The conservative strand of the social capital concept is dominant in much academic and policy research. While the concept has its roots in critical sociology (Bourdieu, 1990), its development in the 1990s owes more to Coleman's (1988) rational choice approach, which dovetails nicely with the tenets of neo-classical economics. Measuring degrees of trust and level of integration into networks as a means of modelling micro- and macro-level market outcomes is an important component in variants of the Coleman approach. (6) In much of the literature, the concept of social capital is applied in deeply functionalist ways; critical theoretical tools that could assess the actors involved in, and the systemic barriers to, building and sustaining social ties are significant in their absence (for a good discussion, see Adkins, 2005). The focus of much of the research on social capital internationally has been on developing quantitative measures of networks, norms and reciprocity. (7) In liberal and increasingly residualist welfare states such as Canada, this focus generally assumes an unencumbered individual who is usually genderless, raceless and classless. (8) For feminist scholars, and for the goal of gender equality more generally, such origins...
|
