Ben Fine has been writing about the limitations of the concept of social capital for more than 20 years. The 34-page bibliography in this book includes 44 separate publications authored by Fine on the topic. He tells us at the outset that he had recently tried to resist writing further about it, but just when he thought he had escaped its clutches he was pulled back in, when folks at the World Bank invited him to participate in a session designed to show the concept's utility for addressing the problems of economic development around the globe. It was at that point that Fine knew he had to go back into the trenches to fight the good fight on this topic. The result is a book meant to be a synoptic critique on how the concept of social capital continues in an era of globalization to be far too fashionable a social science conceit and needs to be taken down a peg or two (at a minimum). The text delivers on its promise, providing an exhaustive, if at times exhausting, blow-by-blow analysis demonstrating that the trendiness of the social capital concept has led to its ever-widening trivialization across a growing number of academic disciplines, such that its contribution for helping us understand how to respond to the problems of globalization could well be negative.
Theories of Social Capital is not your usual academic monograph; it is not, strictly speaking, a focused study of a particular topic based on empirical research, qualitative or quantitative. There are some index searches and other attempts to demonstrate how the concept of social capital has achieved its hypertrophied status. Nor is it the usual theoretical investigation of an idea or concept; it lacks sustained attention to the development of the idea's component parts or a demonstration of the concept's uses and applications. Instead, the book is a no-holds-barred critique of the growing literature that exemplifies the popularity of this concept in the current period. And it is quite polemical. Its subtitle is Researchers Behaving Badly. The text is studded with puns (some better than others).
Fine critiques James Farr's attempt to examine the intellectual history of the concept of social capital by saying that social capital has no intellectual history! Yet, throughout, the book relies heavily on George Ritzer's idea of the McDonaldization of social relations in an era of globalization to drive home the point that in the hands of social scientists today, social capital has become a cheapened version of the original idea. The problem is that one cannot really say this without implying that the concept has an intellectual history. In over-the-top polemical style, as it moves to its central object of concern—Robert Putnam's thesis about the decline of social capital in his widely read book Bowling Alone (1995)—Fine's narrative invokes both the bowling obsessions of the movie The Big Lebowski and the fact that the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh used a bowling club to organize the bombing of the federal building there. The looseness of this polemical level of discourse is exemplified by Fine's calling The Big Lebowski The “Great” Lebowski. This is a polemic with very little time for attention to detail. But only in part.
While the polemical style can be its own form of McDonaldization of arguments that are deserving of a more nuanced presentation, the book's narrative is redeemed by its relentlessness. Theories of Social Capital held this reader's attention throughout by consistently revealing in detail, on the one hand, the shortcomings of most of the many analyses it examines and, on the other hand, effectively underscoring the insights of the few studies found worthy of commendation. In the end, in spite of the polemics and not because of them, the case is convincingly made that what started out as a nuanced concept has become a trivialized fad. Social capital is its own form of social capital that social scientists can invoke to make their study of other things superficially seem to be new and different, trendy and cutting edge.
The book begins by highlighting how social capital continues to grow in popularity, spreading across disciplines and recently becoming even a popular topic at the World Bank in its efforts to address underdevelopment in a globalizing world. Fine returns to his earlier writings to provide background on how two main forms of the social capital concept arose of the last 30 to 40 years. The first is indebted to rational choice models that stress economistic thinking. For the author, this first school of thought is best exemplified by the writings of the economist Gary Becker (inadvertently missing from the index) and the sociologist James Coleman.
The second version of the concept grows out of the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and provides a more nuanced sociological account of how social capital is but one form of capital that people can trade on in order to negotiate their way through social networks. Bourdieu is at pains to stress the importance of human, economic, and cultural as well as social capital, with all having the ability to be expressed in order to realize symbolic capital. Fine does criticize Bourdieu for allowing culture and social relations to trump how economic structures, say, the capitalist economic structure, create the rules and resources by which people can make their way in the world; however, he still prefers Bourdieu's to Becker's and Coleman's more individualistic rational choice framework that occludes altogether consideration of political-economic context. Fine goes on to show that in spite of its advantages over time, Bourdieu's perspective got marginalized, the rational choice perspective got overemphasized, as in the prominent work of Putnam, and even though there has been a BBBI (Bringing Bourdieu Back In) movement, it has largely reemphasized Bourdieu's ideas in a piecemeal fashion that reinforces the economistic rational choice perspective. For Fine, what remains neglected is the Bourdieuian sensitivity to context concerning how social actors use social capital to work their way in a social field.
By the time the World Bank arrives with its attempts to build social capital in the Third World, we lose the ability to account for context, structure, political economy, and the limits of global capitalism. At this point, social capital is not just a trivialization of its original self but also a rationalization for neoliberal policies that promote a globalizing capitalist economy.
This, then, is a very worthwhile polemic. It generates critical thinking about the social sciences and their complicity in the neoliberal failure that goes by the name “globalization.” Public policies designed to get the poor to acquire more social capital so that they can better themselves are just the latest way to ignore the power of economic structures that oppress the poor. As a concept, social capital has been reduced to the newest version of the culture-of-poverty argument that the poor have only themselves to blame for their poverty.
