Social capital and social policy in the UK

Social capital is one of those amorphous terms that appear to have the ability to cross the barriers of politics and academia and acquire a wider popular usage. Yet, to a large extent, the recent interest shown in the term in the UK merely reflects the longer-held fascination the concept has enjoyed among politicians and policy makers in North America. Indeed, the fact that social capital has enjoyed such a swift ascendancy into the political dialogue on this side of the Atlantic can be seen as in no small part due to the limited theoretical engagement there has been with the notion in academic circles here. Thus, when in 1996, and still only leader of the opposition, Tony Blair propounded the value of social capital within a speech to the CBI, he was paying lip service not to the work of a British academic but to that of the North American political polemicist Francis Fukuyama (King and Wickham-Jones, 1999, p 199). Even so, and although enthusiasm for this notion has been heavily influenced by trends in North American political circles, in the context of the UK the ideas of Anthony Giddens (1999) have undoubtedly provided at least some of the impetus behind engagement with the term. Particularly influential here have been Giddens’ views on civic participation and its role in the reinvigoration of civil society (1999), which presaged the arrival of social capital into the political landscape of the UK. In fact, in many ways the notion of social capital has proved to be an ideal rhetorical tool for New Labour to operationalise the ‘Third Way’ project, which, in its most basic sense, refers to a process of socialisation, or the need to generate norms of behaviour of the type commentators have interpreted as the essence of social capital (Putnam, 1993, 2000; Fukuyama, 1995, 1999; Leonardi, 1995). Moreover, following New Labour's 1997 election victory, and their more recent success at the polls, the social aspect of the Third Way agenda has found its home in the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), a central focus of which has been the revitalisation of civic life within the UK (SEU, 1998, 1999).