More to social capital than Putnam

I would like to comment on the editorial by McKenzie et al (2002) regarding social capital and mental health.

Putnam's conceptualisation of social capital is the one that has caught the interest of policy-makers in recent years but it is pre-dated, by at least a decade, by Bourdieu's (1980, 1985) theory of capital which, I would argue, has more relevance for the study of social and health inequalities. Portes (1998, 2000) gives an accessible account of this dynamic view of social capital.

One of Bourdieu's main insights is that people consciously participate to build their various forms of capital and then use them to their advantage. In this way, social capital is a property of the individual, acquired though it may be through group membership. More importantly, social capital (along with all the other forms of capital) is then implicated in the production and reproduction of the very inequalities it is generally thought to mediate against. This dialectic poses some very real questions for the study of health inequalities over the life course, especially with regard to the possibility of disentangling any direct effects of social capital on health from the indirect effects of social capital through increased social mobility and access to economic capital.

This dynamic view of social capital also allows health research to go beyond examining health ‘status’ to investigate its role in the onset of and recovery from illness and poor health. Those with low stocks of capital are more likely to become ill and take longer to recover or are less likely to recover at all. Further, they are more likely to suffer adverse consequences of their illness in other fields, such as regaining employment, thus contributing to the widening of health inequalities.

Although I agree with most of the editorial on the potential of social capital as a heuristic device in studies of mental health, I was disappointed that it gave the impression of theoretical or conceptual consensus on the issue. I hope that my brief sketch will encourage researchers to go further than Putnam's ideas.