Page 93 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

84 Cultural change and ordinary life

distribution of social capital across the population. This is particularly the case
in class terms, but is also true with respect to age. Thus, Hall argues that: ‘The
two groups who face marginalization from civil society are the working class
and the young’ (p. 53). This could have significant future effects (see later) if
such trends continue.
Hall’s work is therefore important in illustrating some key aspects of
social life in contemporary Britain, pointing to the continued importance
of associative life in Britain. However, it also shows that trust is in decline and
that social factors concerning education, class and the actions of government
have sustained this picture. Moreover, the divisions between those who have
social capital and those who do not and those who trust and those who do not
may be getting worse.
Hall’s work is useful on a number of levels for the argument of this book.
He points to the continued salience and significance of social capital in Britain,
illuminates its key contours and introduces a number of arguments concern-
ing the explanation for these processes. Furthermore, in particular, he offers
evidence for the complex relationship of media consumption to other dimen-
sions of social capital. However, it is also important to consider whether these
processes have been subject to further change in recent years. Thus with
respect to the media it can be suggested that recent changes, contextualized by
political processes of deregulation and technological/economic ones of media
convergence around digitization may be producing an environment, where
media will have a different relation to social capital processes. However, before
this argument can be further considered in the rest of this book, it is necessary
to update the trends that Hall identified.
This has been done in some collaborative work on political engagement
(Warde et al. 2003). We used the BHPS to update the work done by Hall on
political engagement. As with the work on TV discussed earlier, the BHPS is a
very useful survey as it tracks a sample that ‘was designed to remain broadly
representative of the population of Great Britain as it changed through the
1990s’ (Warde et al. 2003: 515). It was:
Designed as a annual survey of each adult (16+) member of a nationally
representative sample of more than 5,000 households, making a total
of approximately 10,000 individual interviewees. The same individuals
were re-interviewed in successive waves and, if some had already separ-
ated from their original households, all adult members of their new
households were also interviewed. Children were interviewed once they
reached the age of 16: there was also a special survey of 11–15 year old
household members from Wave 4 onwards.
(Warde et al. 2003: 515)
We examined membership and political activism through the 1990s
using these data. Four key points emerged. First, the characterization of Hall,
that Britain is not suffering a decline in social capital as demonstrated by
Putnam for the USA, was confirmed. As measured by memberships of volun-
tary associations, social capital has held steady during the 1990s and might
even have increased. Second, there is also a continued increase in female
participation. Third, again in agreement with Hall, we found that there