Present and Absent in Troubling Ways: Families and Social Capital Debates

Social capital has become a key concept in Government policy-making and academic circles. Particular forms of social capital theorising have become dominant and influential, invoking certain conceptions of the nature of family life. Inherently, ideas about ‘the family’ not only draw on gender divisions in fundamental ways, but also on particular forms of intergenerational relationships and power relations. This paper explores the place, and understandings, of family in social capital theorising from a feminist perspective, including the way that debates in the social capital field interlock with those in the family field. These encompass: posing both ‘the family’ and social capital as fundamental and strong bases for social cohesion, but also as easily eroded and in need of protection and encouragement; the relationship between ‘the private’ and ‘the social’; notions of bonding and bridging, and horizontal and vertical, forms of social capital as these relate to ideas about contemporary diversity in family forms and the nature of intimate relationships; and analytic approaches to understanding both the natures of social capital and family life in terms of an economic or moral rationality. It argues for greater reflexivity in the use of social capital as a concept, revealing rather than replicating troubling presences and absences around gender and generation as fundamental axes of family life. ‘We can only realise ourselves as individuals in a thriving civil society, comprising strong families and civic institutions buttressed by intelligent government … a modernised social democracy for a changing world which will build its prosperity on human and social capital’. (Tony Blair, 1998, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century: 3–20)