From 'Bridging Social Capital' to 'Co-operative Social Capital'? Mapping Emergent Connectivities across Communities

Our project consisted of a research review and a scoping study. The focus of the research review was on the place, role and significance of social capital in the Labour and Coalition Governments. We examined two 'policy areas', namely community cohesion (Labour) and 'The Big Society' (Coalition). For each policy area we examined an archive of documents, reports and speeches. With regards to the Coalition Government our major finding was that there was a concerted effort to avoid certain terms and concepts that were associated with the Labour administration. However, we did note that aspects of the Coalition Government's emphasis on localism and the 'Big' citizen were closer to, for example, Putnam's emphasis (in his book Better Together) on bottom-up and spontaneous examples of social capital, than the Labour Government's top-down attempts to re-orient what they viewed as 'bad' (bonding) social capital to facilitate 'good' bridging social capital in a range of socially excluded and allegedly 'culturally' segregated communities. Our major recommendation was that many more policy areas across the two Governments should be examined in a more comprehensive review.