social capital
>The Illusion of Social Capital
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Ben Fine considers the ways ideas of social capital have degraded our sense of public policy @ New Humanist.
Do you sing in a choir? Train your daughter’s football team? Belong to a residents’ association? Participate in Neighbourhood Watch? Enjoy regular coffee mornings? Well done. You possess a vitally important commodity. You have social capital.
In the past two decades academics and politicians have fallen over themselves in their rush to embrace this new concept. Its leading academic proponent, Robert Putnam, whose 1995 essay “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” became a bestselling book, was reputedly the single most cited author across the social sciences in the 1990s, granted audiences with US Presidents Clinton and Bush, and with Prime Minister Blair (who set up a “social capital unit” in his cabinet office).
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )And yet social capital remains a distinctly nebulous idea. Derived from the cliché that it’s not what you know but who you know that counts, it focuses on the importance of cultivating connections between people. The more connections you have the better your life will be. But that doesn’t really get you very far. What, for example, if you happen to know the wrong people or get into the wrong crowd? Then you would acquire what is known as dark, perverse or negative social capital: think Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia or fascism.
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