Social Capital: What Is in It for Feminist Economics?
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SOCIAL CAPITAL: WHAT IS IN IT FOR FEMINIST ECONOMICS? Irene van Staveren August 2002 Working Paper 368 The author is grateful to an anonymous referee for valuable comments, and to participants at the social capital session of the IAFFE Conference, Los Angeles, 12-14 July 2002, for their comments. 0 The Institute of Social Studies is Europe's longest-established centre of higher education and research in development studies. Post-graduate teaching programmes range from six-week diploma courses to the PhD programme. Research at ISS is fundamental in the sense of laying a scientific basis for the formulation of appropriate development policies. The academic work of ISS is disseminated in the form of books, journal articles, teaching texts, monographs and working papers. The Working Paper series provides a forum for work in progress which seeks to elicit comments and generate discussion. The series includes the research of staff, PhD participants and visiting fellows, and outstanding research papers by graduate students. For further information contact: ORPAS - Institute of Social Studies - P.O. Box 29776 2502LT The Hague - The Netherlands - FAX: +31 70 4260799 E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 0921-0210 Comments are welcome and should be addressed to the author: CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................ 1 2. SOCIAL CAPITAL IN ECONOMICS............................................................ 3 2.1 Empirical Studies of Social Capital ...........................................................4 2.2 Integration of Social Capital in Economics ...............................................8 2.3 Social Capital in Alternative Views on Economics .................................13 3. SOCIAL CAPITAL: WHAT’S IN IT FOR FEMINIST ECONOMICS? ..... 17 3.1 Gender in Social Capital Research........................................................... 18 3.2 Cross-Fertilisation of two Research Agendas? ........................................22 4. CONCLUSION.............................................................................................. 24 REFERENCES................................................................................................... 25 1 1. INTRODUCTION Economics has been criticised from a wide variety of perspectives, in more or less fundamental ways. Often the critiques develop into some theoretical position, which fits more or less easily, or not at all, with mainstream theories (old and new in- stitutional economics being examples of either of such fits). Feminist economics, to- gether with a few other new areas of research in the discipline such as environmental economics, entails a broader position vis-à-vis the mainstream. As is clear from over a decade of feminist economic publications, it ranges from empirical research, measur- ing, describing, and explaining gender differences in the economy, to conceptual inno- vations drawing on gender studies in other disciplines, to fundamental critiques of mainstream economic methodology, epistemology, and theory (Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson, 1993; Sandra Harding, 1995). So, there is feminist neoclassical econom- ics as well as feminist marxist, institutional, post-keynesian economics, and political economy, all employing gender analyses to the study of the economy. In this process of engendering economic theories, feminist economics has shown that it benefits from in- teraction with other strands of critique of economics. For example, gender norms can be understood as institutions that guide and constrain economic actors’ behaviour (Nancy Folbre, 1994; Ann Jennings, 1993), or gender relations in the division of la- bour, production, and consumption within the household are critically explored with the help of insights developed in bargaining theory (Marjorie McElroy, 1990; Amartya Sen, 1990; Janet Seiz, 1991; Notburga Ott, 1992; Bina Agarwal, 1997). A relatively new critique of economics can be found in the concept of social capital. It is not a theory, nor a clearly distinguishable field of study, but indeed a con- cept, which has triggered an enormous amount of literature, most of it only since the mid-1990s. Most literature on social capital can be found in political science and soci- ology, but the concept has found its way into economics as well. Basically, the concept addresses the ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ aspects of human behaviour, recognising that these dimensions have economic implications. More precisely, some economists have recog- nised that, contrary to the assumptions of neoclassical economic theory, markets would not be able to function without the social characteristics that are regarded as making up social capital (David Korten, 1996; Irene van Staveren 2001). Given the variety of views among economists on social capital, there are various definitions of social capital around. Most definitions emphasise a functionalist dimension, referring to collective action (in political science definitions), to social cohesion (in sociology), or to wellbe 1 ing or even economic growth (in economics). In van Staveren (2000: 7) I have sug- gested a more neutral definition of the concept, in which I understand social capital as a shared commitment to social values as expressed in the quantity and quality of social relationships. Whatever the exact definition, social capital appears to be a notion that tries to address a serious gap in economics, a gap that is also sharply criticised by femi- nist economists. Feminist economists have shown that most of economics lack attention to relations between economic actors, that power and norms are ignored, and that the construction of economic rationality excludes emotion, morality and cultural values (Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson, 1993; Edith Kuiper and Jolande Sap, 1995). The origins of the concept of social capital are often traced back to the sociolo- gists Pierre Bourdieu (1986) and James Coleman (1988), although the general idea of the role of the social in the economic is much older, and can be found, for example, in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. While Bourdieu emphasises the durable network character of social capital and its embeddedness in power relations, Coleman’s definition is more functionalistic, and in that sense compatible with the more com- monly known forms of capital. But the concept became really popular among econo- mists with a widely quoted study by political scientist Robert Putnam (1993), on the differences in social capital between North and South Italy. Putnam has argued that dif- ferences in democracy and economic development between the two regions in Italy could be best explained by different levels of social capital. He distinguished two widely referred to types of social capital, bonding social capital which he located within groups, and bridging social capital, which has a more generalised character an can be found in the connections between people across groups. Hence, group membership, or associational life, is an important variable in Putnam’s approach to social capital. In economics, Coleman’s work on social capital was picked up by Gary Becker (1996) who integrated social capital as a preference in utility functions. The World Bank (1998) has also embraced the notion and emphasises the capital aspect, linking social capital to civil society and regarding it as a resource for the economic development process of poor countries. Francis Fukuyama’s (1995a) best seller Trust claims that this moral value helps to explain economic success of enterprises and nations. In the mean time a wide variety of economists has borrowed the concept for a wide variety of re- search. The literature on social capital and trust in economics has become so extensive, 2 that I cannot even try to do justice to it1. My review below therefore necessarily draws on a small selection of the literature, focusing on the more frequently cited publica- tions, edited volumes, and evaluative publications. Furthermore, a more subjective se- lection was done from the empirical literature, biased by the author’s involvement in development studies and therefore including more developing country studies and less OECD country studies. Moreover, literature in environmental studies referring to social capital will not be taken into account, since that is again a different and complex set of literature (see, for example, the World Bank view on the link between poverty and the environment through social capital in World Bank 1997). Given these limitations, the paper will try to provide a summary of some major ideas and findings in the social capital literature in economics and identify possible op- portunities for (mutual) beneficial exchange with feminist economics. 2. SOCIAL CAPITAL IN ECONOMICS The overview that will follow below will distinguish between three categories of social capital research: empirical, integrationist, and alternative approaches. Each of these categories will also pay attention to some major publications on trust, which is commonly agreed to be an important constituting element of social capital. There is some overlap between the categories that I will distinguish, but in general publications tend to fall more in one than in one of the another categories. The first category, that of empirical research on social capital, is by far the largest: economists have shown an eager interest in transforming the abstract idea of social capital into measurable vari- ables and model specifications, for which often secondary