ABSTRACT
Introduction: a social identity approach to social capital The concept of social capital has been used in a variety of ways and has been much debated, but perhaps the best definition is still one of the earliest, namely, Pierre Bourdieu’s: ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition’ (Bourdieu 1986: 248). Subsequent research on social capital has emphasised trust and the norms of cooperation (Hooghe and Stolle 2003). In this chapter, social capital is thus taken to be the economic and non-economic benefits produced by cooperation and trust in social networks. The concept of capital, of course, is fundamental to economics. But cooperation and trust are at best peripheral concerns in standard economics, which is built around explaining economic life in terms of competition and individual interest. The social network idea also has little place in standard economics, which explains social interaction almost entirely in terms of competitive equilibrium market processes. Thus the concept of social capital refers to a social domain that has clear economic significance (e.g. Bebbington et al. 2006), which is not easily explained by standard economic theory. This tells us that the concept of social capital is in need of an alternative form of economic explanation that involves re-explaining individual behaviour and social interaction in ways that are consistent with the evidence regarding trust and cooperation in social networks. This task is partially undertaken in this chapter by representing individuals as socially embedded and by explaining their social embeddedness using social identity analysis.2 The evidence regarding trust and cooperation in social networks relevant to the discussion here is the extensive body of research demonstrating that trust and cooperative relationships in social networks operate through two main types of channels distinguished by Robert Putnam (2000): bridging and bonding social capital. This chapter argues that the different forms of trust and cooperation involved in these two types of network relationships correspond to two types of social identity relationships distinguished in social psychology’s social identity theory: relational social identities and categorical
social identities. The chapter then explains how individual behaviour is socially embedded in terms of the different ways individuals interact in networks of social relationships in connection with these two types of social identity. Social identity theory is based on the idea that membership in social groups is an important determinant of individual behaviour. Social groups are collections of individuals who coordinate their action in some way. But a social group world is complex in two ways. On the one hand, individuals vary in the degree to which they participate in social groups and also regularly change their group memberships. On the other hand, social groups vary in size and structure, and differ in the ways in which they establish trust and cooperation among their members. This implies that the social group world is a dynamic one, and that, in contrast to standard economic analysis, which simplifies social interaction by restricting it to market competition between atomistic individuals framed in terms of equilibrium states, an analysis of social interaction in terms of social groups and individuals is better developed in an evolutionary manner.3 Social network analysis (e.g. Easley and Kleinberg 2013) provides a structural framework for this, but to capture change and evolution, it also needs to be supplemented by some sort of account of what motivates individual behaviour in a social group world. This chapter employs a particular form of conflict analysis appropriate to social identity theory to achieve this. In social identity theory, groups can come into conflict for multiple reasons, and conflict also results from the ways in which people identify with one another. This chapter focuses on how these two forms of conflict are related, and specifically argues that social conflicts generate personal conflicts for individuals that motivate them to act in ways that they believe will reduce those conflicts. Individual action in turn then impacts individual membership in social groups, so that overall there exists a complex set of feedback relationships continually operating between individuals and groups (Kirman 2011: 40). This analysis thus contributes another dimension to the understanding of trust and cooperation as the foundations of social capital. As forms of social coordination, trust and cooperation are generally seen to be non-conflictual. But conflicts between social groups show that trust and cooperation can be associated with conflict as well, as for example when particularised trust within ethnic groups operates in conjunction with conflict between different ethnic groups. Yet the opposite can also be the case, as when trust and cooperation in particular social group settings is successfully extended across social groups to produce generalised society-wide trust. Thus the individual-social group dynamic which social identity theory examines interacts with a conflict-trust dynamic that social capital theory examines.4 This chapter develops this framework in several steps. Section 2 begins by setting out the correspondence between bridging and bonding social capital on the one hand and the two types of social identity relationships distinguished in social psychology’s social identity theory on the other, in order to link up the social network meaning of social capital with two different ways in which individuals are seen to identify with social groups. The section then offers a broad
classification of different types of ‘rationality’ motivations that people have according to these different social identity relationships. Section 3 then discusses the social capital relationship between bridging and bonding social capital, first setting out Putnam’s well-known view. It then reformulates this relationship in terms of relational and categorical social identities in order to incorporate an analysis of how social conflict can give rise to personal conflict. The basic idea is that conflicts between large, impersonal social groups translate into small-scale personal conflicts in the form of face-to-face encounters in role relational settings on account of the way in which relational and categorical social identities are connected. Section 4 addresses how social group conflict and personal conflict interact in such ways as to set up an evolutionary individual-social structure dynamic. On a psychological level, individuals experience personal conflicts as cognitively dissonant, and then respond by either further embracing or alternatively distancing themselves from those social groups of which they are members that are in conflict with other social groups. This behaviour impacts social group memberships, which then alters how people identify with them, which generates a continually on-going individual-social group dynamic of change. Section 5 links this individual-social group dynamic of change to a trustconflict dynamic of change. It argues that the identity approach to social capital when combined with evolutionary thinking casts new light on the relative importance of bonding and bridging social capital in the overall growth of aggregate social capital. The argument in particular is that the growth of bridging social capital has particular importance in being associated with increasing social and occupational role differentiation in modern complex societies. Section 6 makes two brief concluding remarks about social policy regarding promoting trust and cooperation, one about how societies should address social conflict and one caveat regarding the scope of the social identity analysis employed in the chapter.
