The capital that counts

Commonweal, Nov 22, 1996 by Sidney Callahan

How much "social capital" do you possess? Your "material capital" in money and property can be easily ascertained by your friendly mortgage officer, and your "human capital" in genetic endowment, education, and learned skills is easily estimated as well. But what, for goodness sake, makes up your "social capital"? And why is it so important?

I've been wrestling with the intriguing concept of "social capital" in James Coleman's classic Foundations of Social Theory. He was the famous sociologist, beloved of Catholic educators, who found the parochial schools to be superior to other systems because they possessed more social capital than their competitors. But individuals also vary in the amounts of social capital they can draw upon. You can be healthy, wealthy, and technologically skilled yet still be socially impoverished.

Social capital, unlike other kinds of more tangible capital, consists of relationships among persons, groups, and communities that engender trust and/or mutual obligations. These relationships, expectancies, and trusting obligations between persons mean that persons can draw upon social capital in order to act more effectively. Such wealth is not like private property because relationships and the norms they engender can never be completely controlled or disposed of by any single actor.

Obviously, there are as many different forms of social capital as there are different relationships among people and groups. In Coleman's theory, private effectiveness is facilitated by social capital, but it also exists as a collective public good. If everyone looks out for everyone else in a neighborhood and all abide by a norm against aggression, then children can walk to school safely and old people can go out at night.

Social capital produces public order as well as general insurance for those who have it. This is especially important when you are old, young, dependent, ill, or in trouble. Your relationships with others will produce the aid they are obligated to give and you can normally expect. Families and kin are the champion providers of these resources distributed according to need rather than according to an individual's productive labor.

Children and others who possess social capital have what Coleman calls the "sustained attention" of others directed specifically at them as whole persons rather than productive but exchangeable cogs in a corporation. Happily, this caring attention and investment appear to increase responsibility for the other person. If you possess social capital, Coleman notes, someone would be there to claim your body if you suddenly ended up in the local morgue as an accident victim.

While it is hard to measure social capital directly, it can be inferred from its powerful effects. Certain conditions favor the growth of social capital. Sustained attention, trust, and personal bonds tend to increase if a child has two parents in the home, competes with fewer siblings, moves infrequently, rarely changes schools, is a member of a church community, and attends a religious school. He or she is less likely to drop out and more likely to achieve success.

I think it is also clear from other psycho-social research that good health is associated with the possession of social capital. Relationships with a supportive network of family and friends appear to buffer stress and to keep the immune system activated. Moreover, you pick up a lot of useful information from persons with whom you are interacting.

Voluntary associations beyond the family directly build up social capital - even if, most famously, the group is a bowling team. All sorts of voluntary associations, the so-called "mediating institutions" that are neither government nor for-profit corporations, can indirectly produce relationships of trust and mutual obligation. Other voluntary associations are formed to serve the public good directly. The local PTA or neighborhood improvement group may generally be undersupported, but the investment of energy by the few benefits the inactive many - all those others known as free riders.

Stability in an environment furthers social capital, as does the continuity of the residents in a community. An individual family that moves away from a neighborhood decreases the social capital of those left behind by breaking off a host of interrelationships and bonds. The more closure or interdependent relationships that exist in a community, the more social capital. The more closure, the easier it becomes to enforce norms, especially intergenerational norms. Parents who do not have interdependent ties with other parents in their community have more difficulty controlling their children.

In Coleman's analysis, parents who have fewer mutually dependent relationships with other local parents possess less social capital than their children, who not only possess their intrafamily ties but also have strong bonds with their peers. It's not a fair fight. In my town last year the local parents could not even agree to forbid unchaperoned parties in their homes, much less set a collective curfew for their teen-agers. This reminded me of painful struggles with our own adolescents in the '70s when some of the affluent parents in our neighborhood welcomed their adolescent children's sexual partners and allowed them to sleep together overnight. Other swinging parents smoked pot at home with their kids and their friends.