Social capital means one thing among economists and policy types, but in the work of Pierre Bourdieu it is the umbrella concept for connections and social networks that can be “cashed in” for economic or cultural capital. Unlike economic capital (self-explanatory) and cultural capital (inherited or acquired cultural dispositions of class distinction), social capital doesn’t figure that prominently in Bourdieu’s sociology, but it is one of the three central types of capital driving industrial capitalist social systems. (He also brings up political capital in the case of command economies like the USSR, where access to those in power is crucial to distribution of wealth, goods and status.)
I bring this up because there are two interesting bits I’ve come across on the subject. At the lower end of the social spectrum, Noam Scheiber writes of the poverty foregrounded by Katrina,
Wilgoren followed two families struggling to evacuate New Orleans in the flood’s aftermath: one white and middle class (though hardly affluent, as Wilgoren notes), the other black and poor. The outcome of the story will surprise no one. The first family quickly found comfortable accommodations in a northern Louisiana hotel, then a semi-permanent home in a nearby town. As of Saturday, the second family was still shuffling from one endless line to another–hungry, unshowered, unsure of its next move.Â
What’s fascinating are the ways in which the two families navigated, or failed to navigate, the crisis. The matriarch of the middle-class family, a local court clerk, tapped a cousin to secure a low corporate rate at the Lafayette Hilton. She paid for it with her American Express card. The woman then worked connections in local government and churches to land a scarce rental property. She even won a dispensation from local authorities to sneak back into her abandoned house in a quarantined area so she could rescue some televisions and furniture.Â
Needless to say, the poorer family had no such advantages. The husband had never been out of New Orleans before; the wife had never flown on a plane. Neither appeared to have contacts capable of assimilating them into another community; in any case, the concept of doing so seemed altogether unimaginable to them. And, while the family had $2,000 in savings, they didn’t have a bank account. Their money burned up along with their apartment in a fire that followed the flood.Â
Clearly, a lack of money is far from the only handicap afflicting the poor. They lack the basic life skills, social networks, and general sense of agency that even the slightly more affluent–working-class people–take for granted.
This is one of the clearest explanations of social capital I’ve seen, even at its modest level (we wouldn’t accuse the white family of undue nepotism) and even if Scheiber doesn’t use the term. In the end I find his call for a non-ideological policy approach unsatisfactory - I’m all for technocracy, but even innovate approaches like housing vouchers just chip obliquely at the problem.
Meanwhile, Henry Farrell responds to a Tyler Cowen review of Barbara Ehrenreich.
Ehrenreich’s experiences as a middle-aged woman with a thin resume and no networks worth speaking of stacks up, shall we say, in an interesting fashion against Michael Brown’s experiences as a (slightly less) middle-aged man with an equally thin resume (if not a worse one) and high-level connections to the Republican kleptocratic classes. Tyler is right that personal networks count for a lot. But Ehrenreich’s riposte, I imagine, would be that the networks you have access to are a product of both your social position and your ‘ability to be a suck-up.’
Again, the concept of social capital, only at the level of the white collar professional. Bourdieu may not be the end all-be all of class analysis, but I find his model so persuasive in its explanatory power that I’m wondering why someone hasn’t come along and written an accessible American class sociology in the vein of his work.
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