Making is Connecting by Gauntlett David

Author:Gauntlett, David [Gauntlett, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-29T07:00:00+00:00

THE CAUSES OF COLLAPSING SOCIAL CAPITAL

Putnam’s discussion of these questions is again considered at length, and with lots of data. Here he is able to show that, despite his apparent fondness for the ‘good old days’, he is not a social conservative. He finds no reason to blame changes in family structure, or women’s much greater employment outside the home, or the growth of the welfare state. He does not feel able to blame capitalism in general, since America has ‘epitomised market capitalism for several centuries’, whilst his observed collapse of social capital is a more recent phenomenon. However, he does note that the increasing nationalization and globalization of shops, banks, and businesses is having an impact. Part of this problem is that big brand-name shops, rather than independent stores, would be less likely to act as local hubs of information and social connection, and would be less likely to take their stock from local makers and producers. Putnam’s focus, though, is largely with the decline in civic commitment on the part of business leaders. Philanthropy and community engagement used to be of importance to American business people, whereas today – as one contact complained to Putnam – ‘They’re all off at corporate headquarters in some other state.’20 This is likely to be a significant factor ‘as regards larger philanthropic and civic activities’, Putnam muses, but it ‘is less clear why corporate delocalization should affect, for example, our readiness to attend a church social, or to have friends over for poker, or even to vote for president’.21

Having considered a range of possible explanations, Putnam arrives at four main factors that he says have caused the decline in civic engagement and social capital:

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Generational change: This is Putnam’s biggest factor, accounting for ‘perhaps half of the overall decline’, as ‘an unusually civic generation’ born earlier in the twentieth century are slowly replaced by their ‘less involved’ children and grandchildren.22 ‘Generational change’ is not really an explanation in itself, of course: the actual explanation seems to be that the experience of World War II cemented the centrality of community, solidarity, and self-sacrifice, in a way which subsequent conflicts and causes have not.

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