Page 94 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Capitals and the use of time 85

was increased polarisation in the class base of social capital. The difference
is increasingly between the service class and the rest. Fourth, and perhaps
most significantly, we drew an important finding from the panel aspect of
the BHPS. Thus, there is some volatility in voluntary association membership.
Therefore:

In the light of the large numbers of people who move in and out of
organizations from year to year, Britain appears to be a more participatory
and active society that might otherwise be imagined. Very few people
were never members of any association in the 1990s, a mere 15.6 per cent.
Most associations, including political parties and social movements,
had people move in and out of membership at a substantial and steady
rate.
(Warde et al. 2003: 525)
This finding can be interpreted positively in that it shows that people are
more engaged than a snapshot approach might suggest and that they are gain-
ing associational benefits from meeting other people. However, it might also
suggest that people are actually not that committed to their memberships.
These approaches to social capital, based in quantitative data, and with
particular attention to impact on politics and levels of trust, facilitate the con-
struction of a picture of the state of these aspects of ordinary life in contem-
porary Britain. In short, we are still involved and engaged, the engagement of
women has increased, but the class differences in engagement are increasingly
salient. This might be even more worrying given the way in which Gershuny
shows that it is the middle classes that are feeling more harried and that their
time for social engagement is potentially under threat. However, despite the
continued significance of social engagement, we are becoming less socially
and politically trusting. This might be attributed to the ‘debunking’ role that
is played by media, in that there are increased numbers of programmes that
question the activities of politicians (through the 24-hour news culture) and of
a range of professional groups from plumbers to doctors (through exposure to
reality TV and contemporary drama). These can only be speculations at this
point. However, they do introduce two key issues with the sorts of data dis-
cussed in this chapter so far. First, the relationship between social capital and
other activities (apart from politics in the broadest sense) requires consider-
ation. For example, it would be useful to explore the impact of these processes
in social capital on cultural capital in more depth. Second, it is important to
get behind the quantitative data to explore how these processes are happening
and what they mean to people. I now move on to consider these issues.

Class and education: economic, cultural and social resources
There are a number of ways in which the relationship between economic,
cultural and social capitals can be explored; however, I will focus on one recent
study that has considered these relationships through qualitative data in a
detailed discussion of education and the middle class.
In Class Practices: How Parents Help Their Children Get Good Jobs, Devine
(2004) reports on an interview study with middle-class people in the USA and