ABSTRACT
The claim that the voluntary sector can contribute to ‘community-building’ by fostering an ‘upward spiral’ of trust and confidence amongst active volunteers or members – particularly within deprived geographical communities – has long been recognized in Britain (see Section 6.4). However, American political scientist Robert Putnam’s suggestion that such activities could be understood as generating ‘social capital’ with broader positive micro-and macro-economic and political consequences has dramatically intensified political interest in this argument over the past 5 years. Moreover, because his formulation has involved framing this claim in a language which connects it with mainstream social science, it has caught the imagination of a range of academic political scientists and economists, and more recently think tanks, who had traditionally been relatively uninterested in the voluntary sector per se. As a result, the communitybuilding function is really the only function of those discussed in Section 6.2 to have been examined in an extensive way at the sector level since around 2000. The debate seems to divide into two broad camps – optimists and sceptics.
