World View: On Robert Putnam's website, writes Paul Gillespie, there is an excellent guide to discussion, activity, news and research on the concept of social capital which he has explored and popularised in his sociological and political writings over the last decade and more.
Notably, there are three references in the news section to his recent involvement in Irish events, including his appearance at the Fianna Fáil think-in this week, Bertie Ahern's initiative in setting up a task force on active citizenship last April, and a speech Putnam gave to OECD education ministers in Dublin last year (www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/).
So the Taoiseach's interest in his work, reiterated in an interview with this newspaper last Saturday, is reciprocated by Putnam and his colleagues. It is good to see these ideas getting a real public airing, since they have much to contribute to a better understanding of our society and how it works. The term "social capital" has entered the mainstream in the human sciences, but it is not uncontroversial.
It can be used critically as well as descriptively, both in research and social policy. And there are now several influential streams of argument against Putnam's account of the decline of community involvement in the United States and other capitalist democracies, best known in his book Bowling Alone, published in 2000 and based on a journal article from 1995.
Social capital refers to dense networks of connections between individuals, including norms of reciprocity and trust, which arise from community involvement. Social networks have value, affecting the happiness and productivity of both individuals and groups. The term has been used widely in contemporary social thought - by Pierre Bourdieu on powerful elites, James Coleman on educational advantage as well as by Putnam and his now numerous disciples. It can be traced back separately to classical theorists like Marx, Marshall, Durkheim and Dewey.
Putnam uses three further major ideas: bridging, referring to inclusive social networking across class and ethnic groups; bonding, to exclusive networking within such groups; and trust or trustworthiness, which underwrites social reciprocity. All three are necessary for a good society.
In a recent retrospect on his work over the last 10 years, he says he originally underestimated the effects of growing inequality and diversity and the decay of mobilising organisations. He is undertaking a major research programme on these issues based on a large-scale survey of social capital in the US. It finds that the more diverse the community the less bridging there is across ethnic groups and the more bonding there is within them. This is bad for social cohesion and equality and tends to reinforce the mutually divisive effects of class and race in American society.
Thus Putnam's new focus does not seem to have diminished the sense of communitarian pessimism for which he has become best known. Nevertheless his website publicises a rich variety of strategies to re-establish community initiatives, including a book of case studies entitled Better Together.
The website also highlights two major series of articles on class and inequality in the US, published earlier this year in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They attracted a lot of attention by publicising crucial facts like these about income and educational inequality: from 1980-2002 the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 per cent of earners more than doubled, while the income gap between college and non-college educated people rose from 31 per cent in 1979 to 66 per cent in 1997. Only 3 per cent of the students in the top universities come from the bottom income quartile and only 10 per cent from the bottom half.
The central importance of race and class in US society has been dramatically confirmed by the New Orleans disaster - a fascinating example of how intragroup bonding has reinforced racial and social divisions, while inter-group bridging appears to have been substantially eroded in the city. Suddenly these issues are pitched to the top of the US political agenda, mocking the Bush administration's nationalist ideology and rhetoric.
In Ireland, too, inequality dogs the Government's efforts to protect and develop social capital. The latest UN Human Development Report this week once again placed this State next to the US in terms of inequality between the richest and poorest, although it acknowledged progress in reducing basic poverty through social transfers over the last 10 years. Robin Wilson pointed out in these pages that inequality erodes social capital while greater equality reinforces it - a pattern confirmed by the UN report which shows Norway and Sweden at the top of the human development listings.
Putnam puts great emphasis on longer commuting times, growing intensity of work and the need for two income families to make ends meet as factors contributing to the erosion of social capital. All are prominent social malaises in Ireland and highlighted by a growing body of research on social capital here. Ireland has not gone as far as the US yet, it finds - but is there a converging trend, in line with the policy debate on Boston/Berlin? European researchers find that although there is a similar political disenchantment, loss of trust and alienation in EU member-states as in the US, results are less convincing as regards non-political involvement and levels of social participation.
It may be that the erosion of civic life in the US is another manifestation of American exceptionalism rather than a universal trend.
Other researchers dispute Putnam's findings in the US, saying that the various elements of social capital change over time. Although political parties and trade unions may erode, new forms of social involvement based on non-hierarchical networks, informal movements and internet surges substitute for them, especially among younger people and women. Looser connections replace static bureaucracies.
The effects can be seen in women's local co-operation, protests about the Iraq war, the G8 summit or the web-based networks used so effectively in the French campaign against the EU constitutional treaty.
A more sophisticated objection to Putnam's approach accepts his empirical findings but disputes the pessimistic conclusions drawn from them. According to Robert Inglehart, the theorist of post-material values, the decline of trust in government and politics should not be seen as a threat to political stability, but indicates that these systems have reached maturity by learning to live with the scrutiny of critical citizens. In his words, "postmodernisation erodes respect for authority, but increases support for democracy".