More Spray on Solution: Community, Social Capital and Evidence Based Policy

The role for government in generating social capital is to create the opportunities for individuals to establish relationships and shared values; that is, to facilitate the creation of networks. The site for network creation is the local community, and community strengthening is the means to do so. (Yehudi Blacher, CEO, Department for Victorian Communities, 2003) We opened our 1981 paper in this journal, '"Community": The Spray-on Solution', by noting that the previous decade had seen a rise in popularity of the concept of community. This, we said, was 'clearly displayed in the array of agencies or programs with community in their titles'. The argument we presented was that this usage of 'community' was ideologically driven. The term community was being cynically used to commend apparently cheaper community based services, while purporting to imply much more. What we address in this paper is how the continuing ideological deployment of 'community' has been joined by 'social capital', what Robert Putnam calls its 'conceptual cousin' (Putnam 2001: 21). In so doing we are especially interested in a linked and similarly vogue catchphrase, 'evidence based policy'. It is on the basis of Putnam's published research (eg 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2003) that the idea of social capital has been given such a high profile in social policy discourse. As the opening quotation illustrates, policy makers have seized on social capital's utility for promoting community as the site where responsibility for ameliorating social problems lies. Social capital is represented by Putnam as readily quantifiable, on the basis of local participation. Thus the concept essentially provides for the operationalisation of community, giving this alluring concept its latest lease on life. But we will argue that the charm of Putnam's highly customized empirical evidence is primarily used to support the established communitarian policy trajectory. What is represented as 'evidence' is selected, embellished, distorted and applied so as to support existing policies. Evidence driven policy is more accurately described as policy driven evidence (Smith et al 2001, Marmot 2004, Crabtree, 2004). Evidence, policy and social capital It is unlikely to be coincidental that Harvard Professor Robert Putnam's take on 'social capital' soared to prominence in public policy (Putnam 1994, 1995, 2000), at the same time as 'evidence-based policy and practice' became fashionable. Various Australian governments now warmly embrace Putnam's work and draw on it for evidence that legitimates their policy development. However, as we discuss later, a great deal of the evidence cited comes directly from the USA--and is used without any attention to the many fundamental problems uncovered by critics. For governments, 'evidence' that points to enhancing social capital as the way to go, suggests efficacious social outcomes can be achieved cheaply, by encouraging social interaction at the local level, and by relying on the proven communitarian themes (Bryson and Mowbray 1981). This legitimates minimal government intervention, at a time when there is reluctance to redistribute material resources (Dow 1999; Everingham 2001; Cass and Brennan 2002). Before Putnam, social capital had relatively minor status in sociology, with Pierre Bourdieu (1986) taking a left position and James Coleman (1988) in education, taking a conservative stance. The roots of the Putnam version are also broadly traceable to rational choice theory (Spies-Butcher 2002). Although rarely acknowledged, in 1867 Karl Marx used the term social capital (gesellshaftliche Kapital) to refer to the aggregate of 'individual capitals that formed a fund for further production' (Farr 2004: 23). Farr points out that, though the term 'social capital' was not generally used in the work of nineteenth century political economists including Karl Marx, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall and John Bates Clark, their work underscores 'the importance of associations for begetting social capital'. …