Page 91 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

82 Cultural change and ordinary life

does not have officers, and so on. Thick versus thin summarizes the difference
between being with the same group of people over a range of activities:
Some forms of social capital are closely interwoven and multistranded,
such as a group of steelworkers who work together every day at the fac-
tory, go out for drinks on Saturday, and go to mass every Sunday. There
are also very thin, almost invisible filaments of social capital, such as the
nodding acquaintance you have with the person you occasionally see
waiting in line at the supermarket, or even a chance encounter with
another person in an elevator.
(Putnam and Goss 2002: 10)
Inward-looking versus outward-looking shows that ‘Some forms of social
capital are, by choice or necessity, inward-looking and tend to promote the
material, social, or political interests of their own members, while others are
outward-looking and concern themselves with public goods’ (Putnam and
Goss 2002: 11). Finally, there is the related distinction between bridging and
bonding, which has already been introduced in Chapter 3. To recap: ‘Bonding
social capital brings together people who are like one another in important
respects (ethnicity, age, gender, social class, and so on), whereas bridging social
capital refers to social networks that bring people together who are unlike one
another’ (Putnam and Goss 2002: 11). One important aspect of the debate
around Putnam’s work involved consideration of the extent to which the
thesis of the decline in social capital and trust applied to other comparable
societies. The work of Hall (2002) considered these issues in some depth and
it is important to our deeper understanding of the nature of ordinary life in
the UK.
Hall considers trends in social capital in five areas: ‘membership in vol-
untary associations’; ‘charitable endeavour’; ‘informal sociability’; ‘generation
effects’; and ‘social trust’. He shows that there has not been a decline in the
membership of voluntary associations, indeed:
[O]verall levels of associational membership in Britain seem to have
been at least as high in the 1980s and 1990s as they were in 1959, and
perhaps somewhat higher. Even when the respondents’ levels of educa-
tion are held constant, the basic inclination of the vast majority of the
British populace to join associations remained roughly the same in 1990
as it was in the 1950s.
(Hall 2002: 25)
The same holds good for charitable work. Likewise the data on informal
sociability, as derived from the sort of research discussed in the previous sec-
tion, seem to suggest that if anything there has been a rise in this. Hall argues,
for example, that increased television viewing has substituted for radio listen-
ing. TV viewing in this argument does not lead to decline in other activities
(although as this book suggests it may change the nature of them). Hall adds
the caveat that the change in habits may have already have happened by
the time that the data are considered, that is, the beginning of the 1950s.
Moreover, Hall argues that there are not the generational effects in Britain that
Putnam found in the USA. Finally, despite the rise (or at least stability) in