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Capital: Bowling Along? April 2001 Alex MacGillivray, at large in London, reports on a recent flutter in the dovecotes of the British establishment. "This week, distinguished US social scientist Robert Putnam has been lionised in the UK, giving seminars at No 10 Downing Street, meeting the British Chancellor, Gordon Brown, appearing on Radio 4 and being attacked in the pages of The Guardian. Credited as the populariser of the concept of social capital, Putnam is best known for his book Bowling Alone which shows that formal and informal networks have declined dramatically in the USA since the 1950s. The concept of social capital has long been of interest to researchers who see it as a missing piece of the development jigsaw in countries as different as Italy and Tanzania, but only recently have policymakers in the USA and UK started to take notice. Putnam's reception in the UK this week, shows that people either love the concept of social capital, or hate it. Those who love it argue that alarming trends help build the case for serious investments in state capacity building and a reinvigorated set of grass roots institutions which build relationships and trust. Those who hate it see Putnam as making a covert attack on working women and popular culture. My verdict of Putnam's breakneck tour of the UK is that social capital indeed offers fresh insights into the obsolescence of some of our older civic institutions, but that his work has not yet registered the dynamism of new popular campaigns - like Jubilee 2000 or Seattle - that start to build social capital electronically and then convert into face-to-face civic protest. Alex
MacGillivray |
