The editors of this large collection – 24 chapters and 460 pages – are explicit about their objective:
Social Capital research claims to be interdisciplinary, but in practice it has been divided into three seminal research strings: sociology, political science and economics. Our main objective here is to balance the troika of sociology, political science and economics by offering important contributions to the study of bonding and bridging [original emphasis] social capital networks. We repeat that bridging networks can be seen as guided by norms of generalized trust that produce positive externalities, while bonding networks are guided by information and particularized trust, thereby giving rise to exclusion. Social research links bonding to qualitative examination of non-excludable and excludable goods and bridging to quantitative analysis of the externalities of social capital. (p. 10)
That passage indicates not only objective, but also style: this is very much an example of the deployment of the troika of sociology, political science and economics – a metaphor based on the traditional Russian harnessing of three horses to a carriage or sleigh when all must pull in harmony for the best effect – operating in what the Wallerstein chaired Gulbenkian commission on the future of the social sciences (1996) described as their nomothetic mode. That commission went on to remark that they had so operated to remarkably little effect, and whilst the text under review contains many useful elements, taken as a whole it does not challenge that harsh assessment.
The book is divided into seven sections dealing respectively with why cooperation? classical explanations; why cooperation? recent explanations; corruption and the quality of institutions; the welfare state; the role of the state (with reference to the specifics of tax compliance, environmental regulation and the labour market rather than in terms of general theories of the state); migration and integration; the economy; and measurement. The contents represent a reasonably comprehensive overview of nomothetically oriented discussion of the nature of social capital research. The overall character of this is well illustrated by Ostrom and Ahn in Chapter 2 of the collection:
The reason for this rapid growth in the social capital literature lies in part in the limits of ‘standard’ approaches to the problems of economic development and political order. Abundant anomalies have accumulated that call for the careful examination of the factors that were left out of earlier theories. The differential political and economic performance across nations and communities, for example, could not be answered satisfactorily without seriously studying the omitted factors: trust and norms of reciprocity, networks and forms of civic engagement, and both formal and informal institutions . . . The social capital approach takes these factors seriously as causes of behaviour and collective social outcomes . . . without dismissing the insights from neoclassical economics and rational choice theories. (pp. 17–18)
And that for this reviewer is the problem since I am firmly convinced that neo-classical economics and rational choice theories have the practical utility of a matched pair of chocolate fireguards. It is not so much that the chapters in the collection are useless because they operate in a frame of reference which endorses this position, on the contrary the great majority are actually informative – although that dealing with ‘social capital and the brain’ provides yet another illustration of how deploying the useful clinical instrument of the scanner for the purposes of reductionist explanations of human social organisation represents a true triumph of mindless instrument-driven nonsense. It is rather that so much is left out and what are left out are the insights that come from genuine historical sociology. Several of the chapters in the collection illustrate their argument by the use of X by Y scattergraphs in which, for example, some index of trust is plotted against state efficacy or public social expenditure (by the way the absence of a listing of all figures and tables is a defect of the collection), with R squared being calculated as in Herreros's chapter dealing with the state in the section on the welfare state. Now this is actually a rather useful exploratory device since it can illustrate general relationships, but what is of course most interesting is the scatter of cases away from the regression line. In other words, what matters if we think in exploratory terms is what is not explained. Herreros's response to scatter is the traditional one of elaboration of the linear model with the contribution of individual variate factors such as education, associational membership etc. evaluated in terms of coefficients. Well what actually matters is how things work together – something which can only be explored in linear models by the introduction of interaction terms but which is far better handled by an approach like Qualitative Comparative Analysis which begins with a real sensitivity to qualitative difference and path dependency. Herreros's substantive discussion, as is the case with many of these chapters, is interesting and informative precisely because he engages with those aspects in narrative terms, but that is in some ways despite rather than because of the formal modelling.
Actually, the collection is not informed by a troika because much of the sociological treatment of issues around social capital is not represented in it. This is not a matter at all of quantitative versus qualitative methods, but rather of the wider perspective on how the social world actually works out in reality. It is true that ethnographic accounts generally have to address the complexity of the causation of the conditions of social reality, as does traditional narrative history, precisely because the narrative form is generally anti-reductionist. Although the methods section does include a useful review of quantitative and qualitative approaches to social capital, this remains reductionist in its focus on tools for elaborating discrete contributions to change. None of the chapters here is really ethnographic or takes the form even of comparative historical narrative.
Therefore, in summary, a useful book, but one which illustrates the problems that arise when there is a failure to engage with substantive methodological issues. What we need in addressing these far from trivial issues is not a troika but a four in hand – with the horses being sociology, heterodox economics with its emphasis on power, comparative history, and political science when it has got over its obsession with linear modelling.
