The Myth of Social Capital in Community Development

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Housing Policy Debate

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The myth of social capital in community development

James DeFilippis

To cite this article: James DeFilippis (2001) The myth of social capital in community development, Housing Policy Debate, 12:4, 781-806, DOI: 10.1080/10511482.2001.9521429

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2001.9521429

Published online: 31 Mar 2010.

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The Myth of Social Capital in Community Development

James DeFilippis King’s College, London

Abstract

This article argues that contemporary interest in social capital by community develop- ment theorists, funders, and practitioners is misguided and needs to be thoroughly re- thought. It argues that social capital, as understood by Robert Putnam and people in- fluenced by his work, is a fundamentally flawed concept because it fails to understand issues of power in the production of communities and because it is divorced from eco- nomic capital. Therefore, community development practice based on this understanding of social capital is, and will continue to be, similarly flawed.

The article further argues that instead of Putnam’s understanding of social capital, community development practice would be better served by returning to the way the concept was used by Glenn Loury and Pierre Bourdieu and concludes with a discussion of how these alternative theories of social capital can be realized in community devel- opment practice.

Keywords: Development/revitalization; Urban environment

Introduction

The extremely rapid rise of social capital is one of the dominant trends in American social science and public policy over the past decade, and this is particularly true of work in housing and community development. This was obvious at the spring 1999 meeting of the Urban Affairs Asso- ciation in Louisville, KY. Social capital was the organizing theme of the conference, and emphasis was placed on how social capital can be gener- ated in low-income communities in the United States. If the meeting was any indication, social capital had, in only about half a decade, be- come one of the principal concerns of community development practi- tioners and researchers. Shortly thereafter, two students walked into their high school in the affluent suburb of Littleton, CO, and began shooting their classmates. This tragic event sparked debates in Ameri- can public life, among them the issue of the isolation and alienation of much of suburban life (Hamilton 1999; Schiff 1999).

Of course, this was not a new criticism to be lodged against the suburbs; people have been making it for quite some time (Friedan 1963; Jackson 1985; Langdon 1994; Wood 1958). But, the feeling of isolation in afflu- ent suburbs (which are now only a segment of the much more race- and class-diverse suburban world) took on new strength in the 1990s and

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resulted in, among other things, the rapid growth of both the cohousing and New Urbanist movements (Hanson 1996; Katz 1994; Knack 1996; McCamant and Durrett 1988; Muschamp 1996; Talen 1999).

But, this sense of isolation presents a problem. If people who are afflu- ent in the United States are struggling with social disconnectedness and isolation, why are people who are concerned with economic develop- ment in low-income areas emphasizing the importance of social connec- tions and networks as a way of moving low-income people and commu- nities out of poverty? There seems, in short, to be disjuncture between, on the one hand, the experiences of the affluent and, on the other, the prescriptions for the poor in American life. This disjuncture, in and of itself, should lead people to question the utility of the social capital framework in community economic development.

This article will discuss the meanings and uses of social capital and argue that its recently acquired privileged position in community eco- nomic development is misguided. To be specific, however, this article is not an argument that social capital does not matter or that it is not an important component in the production and reproduction of individual success and class status. Instead, the argument is that we need to be very careful about how we define and use the term social capital. Social capital is an “elastic term” (Moore Lappe and Du Bois 1997, 119), with a variety of meanings. But the understanding of social capital that has become incorporated into community development theory and practice is the social capital of Robert Putnam (1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000), in which the term is both combined with notions of civil society and assumed to be a principal engine of economic growth and democra- tic government. Putnam’s arguments, however, are deeply flawed and have little empirical or theoretical support, so community development work informed by his framework will be similarly flawed and misguid- ed. Before making these arguments, however, this article will briefly discuss the concept of social capital and how it has evolved through its use by Loury (1977), Bourdieu (1985), Coleman (1988) and then, ulti- mately, Putnam (1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1996, 2000) and his followers.

What is social capital?1

While time and space constraints do not permit a thorough description of the enormous literature on social capital that has emerged in the past seven or so years (Chupp 1999; Fine 2001; Foley and Edwards 1997, 1998; Portes 1998; Wills 2000), it is important to briefly describe the dif- ferent meanings given to the term. It is unclear who first used the term, but an important early use came from Loury (1977) in a book chapter

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1 This section borrows heavily from Portes’s presidential address to the American Soci- ological Association (1998).

that criticized the narrowly individualistic and atomistic understanding of human capital in neoclassical economic theory. He wrote:

The social context within which individual maturation occurs strongly conditions what otherwise equally competent individuals can achieve. This implies that absolute equality of opportunity, where an individual’s chance to succeed depends only on his or her innate capabilities, is an ideal that cannot be achieved.…An individual’s social origin has an obvious and important effect on the amount of resources that is ultimately invested in his or her development. It may thus be useful to employ a concept of “social capital” to repre- sent the consequences of social position in facilitating acquisition of the standard human capital characteristics. (Loury 1977, 176)

Loury was unquestionably right in this assessment, and certainly some- one growing up in East New York, Brooklyn, or the South Side of Chica- go is not starting from the same position as someone growing up in Greenwich, CT, or Glencoe, IL. This is stating the obvious. But Loury needed to make the argument because this apparently self-evident state- ment of reality was clearly not self-evident to human capital theorists who, following Becker (1957, 1964), had come to dominate labor theo- ries in American economics. Human capital formation, instead of being understood as the inherently social process that it is—for example, no one goes to school in isolation from the context in which that school is located, administered, or funded—had come to be almost completely about individual achievement or lack of it.

A concurrently developed theory of social capital came from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1985),2 who is relatively underused in the current literature on social capital in community development. This is unfortunate because his is probably the most theoretically useful and sophisticated attempt to deal with the issue. Bourdieu’s (1985) use of the term social capital is an explicit attempt to understand the produc- tion of classes and class divisions. Social capital, while being constituted by social networks and relationships, is never disconnected from capital. Capital, for Bourdieu (1985), is simultaneously both economic and a set of power relations that constitute a variety of realms and social inter- actions normally thought of as noneconomic. Two key components of his work have been lost in current discussions of social capital. First, the production, and reproduction, of capital is a process that is inherently about power. In fact, Bourdieu’s (1985) conception of capital is such that he almost conceives of capital and power as synonymous. Second, since his interest is in the social production of classes, he distinguishes be- tween the social networks that an individual is embedded in, and out of which social capital precipitates (or emerges), and the outcomes of those social relationships. That is, social networks should not simply be equat- ed to the products of those social relationships, for doing so would ren-

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2 Similarly, this section draws heavily on the work of Fine (1998, 1999, 2001).

der invisible social networks that might be very dense but nonetheless unable to generate resources because of lack of access.

Despite these earlier efforts, the person who brought social capital into the mainstream in the American social sciences was clearly James Coleman (1988), who argued:

Social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate cer- tain actions of actors…within the structure. Like other forms of cap- ital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible. Like physical and human capital, social capital is not completely fungible but may be specific to certain activities. A given form of social capital that is valuable in facilitating certain actions may be useless or even harm- ful for others. Unlike other forms of capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between actors and among actors. (S98)

With this rather “fuzzy” definition (Markusen 1999; Portes 1998), Cole- man (1988) then defines different sets of actions, outcomes, and rela- tionships as social capital. Social capital for him is inherently functional, and social capital is whatever allows people or institutions to act. Social capital is therefore not a mechanism, a thing, or an outcome, but simul- taneously any or all of them. Portes (1998) sees this as a vital step in the evolution and proliferation of the idea of social capital and states: “Coleman himself started that proliferation by including under the term some of the mechanisms that generated social capital; the consequences of its possession; and the ‘appropriable’ social organization that provided the context for both sources and effects to materialize” (5). Finally, social capital, for Coleman (1988), is normatively and morally neutral. That is, it is neither desirable nor undesirable; it simply allows actions to take place by providing the needed resources.

Putnam and the proliferation of social capital theory

Although Coleman’s 1988 work brought social capital into use in the social sciences, the principal source of the idea for community develop- ment practitioners and researchers is Robert Putnam (1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1996, 2000). With his work, social capital is thoroughly redefined and becomes extremely influential in development studies, both in the United States (Gittell and Vidal 1998; Lang and Hornburg 1998; Miller 1997; Moore Lappe and Du Bois 1997; Schulgasser 1999; Servon 1999; Temkin and Rohe 1998; Wallis 1998; Wallis, Crocker, and Schechter 1998; Wilson 1997) and internationally. In fact, to many people in the World Bank, social capital has become “the missing link” in global eco- nomic development (Harriss and de Renzio 1997). Describing the impact of Putnam’s social capital on community development, Chupp bluntly

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states, “In the debate over poor neighborhoods and the ills of society as a whole, social capital has become something of a wonder drug” (1999, 2). Further, Putnam’s redefinition of social capital is almost as dramatic as the widespread impact of his argument, and it therefore requires considerable discussion here. This article argues that with Putnam’s re- definition, social capital ceases to be a useful framework for local or community economic development.

There are several key transitions that occur when Putnam first uses the term social capital in Making Democracy Work (1993a), his book on Italian politics. And while he has expanded and developed his views since then, he has not fundamentally altered them. First, social capital is transformed from something realized by individuals to something possessed (or not possessed) by either individuals or groups of people in regions, communities, cities, countries, or continents. Second, it is conflated with civil society, or more accurately, with a particular neo- Tocquevillean view of civil society. Thus, voluntary, nongovernment asso- ciations, based on trust, become the institutions through which social capital is generated. Third, it becomes primarily a normatively good thing and is given credit for (a) promoting good, democratic government and (b) generating and sustaining economic growth and development. Finally, when Putnam brings this framework to the American context, he does so by making the argument that social capital and civil society are declining in the United States and have been since the mid-1960s (1993b, 1995, 1996, 2000) and that this trend portends long-term eco- nomic and political trouble. These issues will be addressed in turn, before turning to the problems with them and their applications in community development efforts.

Loury (1977), Bourdieu (1985), and Coleman (1988) all argued that social capital is not embodied in any particular person, but rather is embedded in people’s social relationships. At the same time, however, they also stated that social capital was realized by individuals. Putnam, converse- ly, has argued that social capital is a resource that individuals or groups of people possess or fail to possess (Portes 1998; Portes and Landolt 1996). At the outset of his first article on the issue, he states, “Working together is easier in a community blessed with a substantial stock of social capital” (Putnam 1993b, 36). Communities, not people, possess “stocks” of social capital. He has since made this transition from the in- dividual to the larger group more explicit and states, “Social capital can thus be simultaneously a ‘private good’ and a ‘public good’ ” (Putnam 2000, 20). What is important to note is that despite his emphasis on social networks and his moving social capital from the scale of the in- dividual to the scale of the group, Putnam measures social capital with a form of methodological individualism (Skocpol 1996). In his research on social capital in the United States, Putnam (1995, 1996, 2000) uses social survey data to observe the level of social involvement of individ- uals and then simply aggregates up from there to whatever scale is

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being observed. While this might seem a trivial observation, it is, as will be demonstrated later, key to his, and his followers’, understanding of “community.”

Coleman’s (1988) definition, by its lack of clarity, left the door open for a variety of sources of social capital, and Putnam uses that vagueness to seize on trust-based voluntary associations (one of the several exam- ples Coleman offers), and his understanding of them as the constituents of civil society, as the key source of social capital for communities, re- gions, and so on. Putnam argues that “social capital refers to the norms and networks of civil society that lubricate cooperative action among both citizens and their institutions” (1998, v; emphasis in the original). Social capital and civil society therefore become conflated, and the two are almost synonymous. This transition has dramatic implications for the political and theoretical understandings of social capital.

This view of social capital and civil society, unlike Coleman’s (1988), Loury’s (1977), and Bourdieu’s (1985), is one in which they are largely assumed to be a normatively good thing. While Putnam certainly rec- ognizes that there are potentially “negative” forms of social capital, the overwhelming balance of his work is about its benefits. And he argues that they are, in fact, necessary for the functioning of both a responsive democratic government and the economic growth and well-being of places. He states:

An impressive and growing body of research suggests that civic con- nections help make us healthy, wealthy and wise. Living without social capital is not easy, whether one is a villager in southern Italy or a poor person in the American inner city or a well-heeled entre- preneur in a high-tech industrial district. (Putnam 2000, 287)

This understanding of civil society and social capital has its roots in Putnam’s reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1835) view of civil society and democracy, and it is therefore necessary to take a moment to dis- cuss this perspective. De Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s and believed that one of the defining components of Democracy in America (1835) was the propensity of Americans to create and join voluntary associations that were in the domains of neither the state nor the market. Putnam acknowledges his debt to de Tocqueville and states, “Recently, American social scientists of a neo-Tocquevillean bent have unearthed a wide range of empirical evidence that the quality of public life and the performance of social institutions are indeed power- fully influenced by norms and networks of civic engagement” (1995, 66). His reading of de Tocqueville strongly suggests that networks of trust and voluntary associations are “win-win” sets of relationships in which everyone involved benefits. This is evident in his basic definition of the idea. He states, “Social capital refers to connections among individuals— social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what

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some have called ‘civic virtue’ ” (Putnam 2000, 19). Voluntary associa- tions, therefore, are not confrontational encounters based on vested in- terests, but rather “features of social life—networks, norms, and trust— that enable participants to come together to pursue shared objectives” (Putnam 1996, 34; emphasis added). Bowling leagues, PTAs, Elks Clubs, church groups, and trade unions (Putnam 1995) are therefore theoreti- cally, politically, and morally comparable. Even though he examines them individually in his recent book (Putnam 2000), they all perform very similar functions.

But, the benefits of social capital and civil society extend beyond simply promoting and supporting democratic institutions of government to generating and sustaining economic growth. Putnam argues, “Studies of the rapidly growing economies of East Asia almost always emphasize the importance of dense social networks, so that these economies are sometimes said to represent a new brand of ‘network capitalism’ ” (1993a, 38). At his boldest (referring to the Italian case), he states, “These com- munities did not become civic simply because they were rich. The his- torical record suggests precisely the opposite: They have become rich because they were civic.…Development economists take note: civics matters” (1993a, 37). And most recently he states, “Where trust and social networks flourish, individuals, firms, neighborhoods and even nations prosper” (Putnam 2000, 319). It is this understanding of social capital—that it is central to the economic development of communities and regions and nations—which has inspired its rapid incorporation into the community economic development literature in the United States and the underdeveloped world.

Putnam became famous, however, not simply as a neo-Tocquevillean, but as someone who documented the decline in civil society and social capital in the United States. His thesis has been much discussed, so it need not be dealt with in any detail here. Briefly, he has argued (Putnam 1995, 1996, 2000) that the United States has witnessed a withdrawal from civil society and a decline in social capital. He argues that the de- cline of social capital is a generational process in which people who were born in the 1910s and 1920s were (and are) more civicly engaged than their counterparts who were born from the 1930s on. He accordingly dates this withdrawal as having begun in the early to mid-1960s.

Putnam’s followers in community development3

Putnam and his arguments have rapidly become central to the research and practice of community development in the United States. One of the striking things about this explosion of research and practice around his view of social capital and civil society is how it has largely ignored

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3 The phrase “Putnam’s followers” is borrowed from Gittell and Vidal (1998).

an enormous volume of research and literature by academics (Edwards and Foley 1997, 1998; Fine 1998, 1999, 2000; Foley and Edwards 1997, 1998; Galston 1996; Portes 1998; Portes and Landolt 1996; Schudson 1996; Skocpol 1996), people in the popular press (Lemann 1996; Pollitt 1996), and activists (Bowles 1999; Durlauf 1999) who have criticized almost every component of these arguments. Instead, much work in community development is broadly accepting of Putnam’s arguments about the importance of social capital, understood as voluntary associ- ations and civic trust, in the promotion of economic growth and prosper- ity. In fact, to some researchers, Putnam’s views have become almost axiomatic, and in the first sentence in her article on social capital Wil- son unambiguously states: “Social capital creates local economic pros- perity” (1997, 745). In their introduction to a special issue of Housing Policy Debate devoted solely to social capital, Lang and Hornburg (1998) reiterate Putnam’s arguments and state:

Political scientist Robert Putnam expanded and ultimately popular- ized the concept of social capital. Putnam originally applied the idea to a study of Italian regional governments. He showed that the key element underlying the difference between Tuscany’s successful re- gional government and Sicily’s failed one was the degree of “civic en- gagement.”…Putnam also argued that social capital is connected to economic development. Tuscany’s high level of social capital elevates its standard of living. It provides the region a social environment in which productive cooperation in all spheres of civic life is possible. Thus, social capital promotes economic growth. (3; emphasis added)

Similarly, when the Urban Affairs Association held its annual conference in 1999, it was titled “The Social Reconstruction of the City: Social Cap- ital and Community Building.” This is certainly not to suggest that everyone at the meetings accepted Putnam’s arguments, but rather to observe that his work provided the very framework and context for dis- cussions. Foundations have similarly incorporated Putnam’s arguments into their work, and both the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the Mott Foundation have made the construction of social capital a central component of their antipoverty and community devel- opment frameworks. (See Gittell and Vidal [1998] and Wallis, Crocker, and Schechter [1998] respectively, for thorough discussions of these two funding initiatives.) In the case of LISC, this has yielded a perspective on community development organizing that stresses “nonconfrontation- al” methods, and an incorporation of Michael Eichler’s framework of “consensus organizing” (Gittell and Vidal 1998, 2). Given that social cap- ital is being understood as both a set of win-win relationships based on mutual interest and a promoter of economic prosperity and development, this is a logical way for community organizers and community develop- ment practitioners to operate. Thus, Putnam’s view of social capital and voluntary civic associations is being played out in the streets of Ameri- can cities. The problem with all of this is that social capital, as Putnam

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has defined and operationalized it, does not necessarily promote com- munity economic development (or, for that matter, democratic govern- ment).

The problems with Putnam and his followers

Returning to the way Putnam transformed the idea of social capital, I will now present the theoretical and empirical flaws in his analysis and argue that if we are to use the notion of social capital in community development we would be much better served by returning to how it was understood by Loury (1977) or Bourdieu (1985). I will go through Putnam’s transformations of social capital in the same order that they were presented.

Individuals, communities, and power

First, Putnam defines social capital as something that is possessed, or not possessed, by individuals, communities, cities, nations, etc. He and his followers then measure its existence by simply taking individual attributes and aggregating up to the scale being measured. There are two problems with this argument and its associated methodology. First, places are not things. A community cannot possess anything. An institu- tion or an individual can possess something, but a community cannot. Instead, communities are products of complicated sets of social, politi- cal, cultural, and economic relationships (DeFilippis 1999; Massey 1994). Communities are outcomes, not actors. They are, however, outcomes that affect and constrain future possibilities. Communities unquestion- ably matter, but they are not actors that exhibit any form of agency. This might seem like a semantic argument, but this first problem leads to the second one. That is, no place (a community, a region, or whatever) is solely a function of the internal attributes of the people living and work- ing there. If communities are outcomes, they are not simply outcomes of the characteristics of those within them, they are also outcomes of a complex set of power-laden relationships—both internally, within the communities, and externally, between actors in the communities and the rest of the world. Citibank (for instance) and its lending practices, state governments and their education financing policies, and communities in other countries with soon-to-be emigrants are all very real examples of how America’s urban communities are products of a whole host of relations that extend geographically well beyond the place of the com- munity. These relations are often contentious (school funding issues is a classic example) and are always imbued with issues of power. Only by ignoring these vitally important, power-laden connections can we as- sume that communities are the products of the attributes of the individ- uals who live and work in them. Similarly, only by ignoring these con-

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nections can we assume that we can move from the level of the individ- ual to the level of community (or city, or region) or that individual gains and profits are the same as group, or community, gains and profits.

Putnam does try to get at this reality with his concept of “bridging capital” (1995, 1996, 2000), which has been generally accepted within the community development work that has followed him. But once we accept the complexity of the internal and external relationships that produce a community, we clearly need something more than bridging capital as the means to economic development. For instance, individuals in exurban gated communities of Orange County, CA, and indeed in much of the rest of the country are largely devoid of bridging capital (at the community level). As Putnam himself states in his brief discussion of gated communities, “Not only are canvassing politicians and Girl Scouts selling cookies excluded from exclusive communities, but the af- fluent residents themselves also appear to have a surprisingly low rate of civic engagement and neighborliness even within their boundaries” (2000, 210). The importance of this example is that not only are these communities disconnected, but they are also usually exceedingly wealthy. The relationships that produce gated communities are based on the protection of their affluence through their class- and race-based social and geographic isolation from much, if not most, of the metropol- itan areas around them. It is not

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