ABSTRACT
The observation that social capital represents a ‘sack of analytical potatoes’ (Fine 2001) may well be applied to sports development, where it seems that everyone is an expert, has an opinion or has experiential insights that confer expertise. As Long has argued, disagreement in sport is often based on ‘belief rather than evidence’ (2008: 236), reinforcing what Coalter has referred to as the ‘mythopoeic’ (2007a: 9) status of sport where sport is viewed as ‘self-evidently a good thing’ (Rowe 2005). This over generalising of sport has impacted upon both the ‘emergence of sports development as a political issue’ and more importantly its ‘systemic embeddedness’ (Houlihan and White 2002: 230-31) into national and regional policy frameworks in the UK. Sports development’s emergence as a field of both policy and practice is as an adjunct to broader trends in social and economic policy making. Social capital has been used in various contexts for over a century, having been first coined
by Marx and used later by Hanifan and Dewey (Farr 2004). Like sport, social capital has been discussed, dissected and elaborated on by many social scientists, politicians and policy makers and yet like sport it remains a stubbornly contested term with competing theoretical perspectives each indicating its value as both object and subject of policy. Possibly the simplest definition of social capital has come from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which has stated that it includes ‘the networks, norms, values and understandings that facilitate cooperation within or among groups’ (OECD 2001: 4). Within government in the UK, the Strategy Unit identified social capital as consisting of the ‘networks, norms, relationships, values and informal sanctions that shape the quantity and cooperative quality of a society’s social interactions’ (Strategy Unit 2002: 5). In essence, what both of these definitions capture is, in the sense of John Stuart Mill’s ‘conjoint action’ or Adam Smith’s ‘a sense of duty’, a potentially powerful social mechanism for overcoming the problematic notion of collective action. While social capital can be thought of as a ‘diffuse’ concept (Coalter 2007b), it is clear that it
is more than just a useful analytical tool, for, as much of the literature concerning social capital and sport attests to it, or a particularised version of it, it has become embedded within the social policy infrastructure of the UK (see Coalter 2007a, 2007b; Adams 2008; Bradbury and Kay 2008). Indeed internationally where voluntary associationalism is part and parcel of specific sports development infrastructures, social capital has often been identified as a key driver of sports
policy. In Canada, for example, research at one level has specifically sought to inform and guide public policy (see for example Canadian Policy Research Initiative 2005), whilst at another level it has sought to interpret and understand grass-roots sport experiences in light of policy applications of social capital (Donnelly and Kidd 2003; Sharpe 2006; Perks 2007). Internationally it would seem that the intersection between sports development and social capital has crystallised around the pursuit of a number of common and persistent social policy agendas and discourses, of which active citizenship and social inclusion have been prominent. In respect of the UK, Coalter (2007b) has outlined the potential role that sport and sports clubs can have in enabling forms of social capital to be formed and the impact this can have on the possible outcome of policies implemented. Bradbury and Kay (2008) meanwhile, highlight the social capital policy context of the promotion of volunteering to young people, noting that their data indicated that young people were positively inclined towards active citizenship and civic participation and felt more socially connected through volunteering in sport. It is this aspect of social capital that is fundamental in locating sports development as a con-
duit, through which aspects of social and community development can be incorporated into a particular political project. The coming to power of New Labour in 1997 and its adoption of pragmatic Third Way politics, modernisation, an ethic of accountability and an emphasis on governance rather than government has been eloquently dealt with elsewhere (e.g. Levitas 2000; Houlihan and White 2002; Lister 2004; Coalter 2007a, 2007b; Adams 2008; Bradbury and Kay 2008; Houlihan and Green 2009). It is sufficient at this juncture to note that in the UK, New Labour’s social investment strategies have been based on a particular version of civic communitarianism which, in valorising the active citizen, has employed social capital within the notion of ‘rights and responsibilities’ (Giddens 1998; Blair, 1999). The promotion of volunteering (see for example Halfpenny and Reid 2002) has provided an opportunity structure for the successful promotion of social capital via the active citizen and through volunteering to establish ‘bonds of trust and commitment … and encouraging people to work together for common purposes’ (Blair 1996: 116-17). It is in this regard that the promotion of volunteering in sport, often referred to as ‘capacity building’ in policy documentation became part of the mantra of sports development and those seeking to promote the role of sport in forming social capital (DCMS/Strategy Unit 2002; see also Adams 2008). The upshot is that the twin policy outcomes of promoting sports participation and forming social capital have become unwitting bedfellows in what Green has referred to as an ‘unprecedented’ embracing of policies for sport and physical activity by the British government (Green 2007). The use of social capital within policy-making circles, particularly when considered in rela-
tion to sports development, has all too often suffered from a conceptual vagueness that largely stems, as Field notes, from its journey from ‘metaphor to concept’ (Field 2003). In part this is attributable to the enduring disagreement concerning what social capital is and what it does, which for Fine has resulted in a ‘web of eclecticism in which the notion of social capital floats freely from one meaning to another with little attention to conceptual depth and rigour’ (Fine 1999: 9). Certainly many have considered the concept to resemble the reconstruction of old thinking in new packaging (e.g. Edwards and Foley 1997; Portes 1998; Tarrow 1998; Fine 2001), while others have focused attention onto the ‘conceptual stretching’ that is apparent in the many different uses and applications of this particular concept (Portes 1998; Johnston and Percy-Smith 2003). Indeed many writers, commentators and policy makers have identified social capital with the contemporary socio-political zeitgeist, and have seized upon and viewed the concept as a new therapeutic remedy for the ills of society (e.g. Weitzman and Kawachi 2000, also see Halpern 2005). As a consequence it is understandable why Johnston and Percy-Smith (2003: 332) have referred to social capital as ‘the contemporary equivalent of the philosopher’s
stone’. If anything, the explosion of interest in the UK has arguably reached the second stage of Portes’ cautionary warning that social capital has evolved (like other promising social science concepts) ‘from intellectual insight appropriated by policy pundits, to journalistic cliché, to eventual oblivion’ (Portes 1998: 1). This chapter has three objectives: first, to outline the three principal theories of social capital
(henceforth referred to as strains), re-focusing the vagueness with a particular concern to embed each strain within its particular conceptual framework. Second, the chapter addresses how social capital and sports development can be viewed within a policy framework that promotes a strategic orientation to social capital outcomes. The discussion and analysis is informed by a range of public documents produced by government, together with a series of 31 interviews conducted with a range of senior officials across one single county council area in England (Adams 2009). The chapter concludes by summarising how research into sports development and social capital refutes rather than fulfils Portes’ melancholic prophesy.
