Robert Putnam is a rare creature: a respected academic who is also a superb communicator, equally comfortable in the radio studio and a Harvard seminar room.
This week, Putnam received the red-carpet treatment from the British chattering classes: a Downing Street seminar, op-ed pieces, Start the Week with Jeremy Paxman, a lecture at the London School of Economics, an IPPR think-in.
The reason for all the excitement is that Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community, has recently been published over here. His thesis is that social connectedness is on the decline, that communities are suffering from a new absence of civic-mindedness and that the wellsprings of the ties that bind Americans together, or “social capital”, are drying up.
In the US, the number of people joining organisations has dropped by a quarter; church attendance and trade union membership are plummeting; the number of families eating dinner together has fallen by one-third. And the number of people who belong to bowling leagues has dropped significantly – giving Putnam his powerful metaphor for the phenomenon.
Putnam, who has picked up the community debate where Amitai Etzioni left off (see NS Profile, 12 March), distils his findings into impossible-to-resist facts. A ten-minute increase in commuting time causes a 10 per cent drop in community activity; joining a club halves your chances of dying next year. And Putnam warns that the bowling-alone bug may be heading our way.
His description of fraying social ties is eloquent, eminently reasonable and based on a progressive political base. You find yourself unable to resist nodding in agreement. But Putnam is wrong.
The weakness of Putnam’s case lies less in what he says than in what he misses out. His analysis is based on a specific view of what constitutes “community”. It is true that PTAs, Scout groups, churches and trade unions are suffering. So there is no denying that the forms of community he examines are weakening.
But Putnam overlooks construction sites of new social capital, including informal friendship networks as well as virtual communities created and maintained in cyberspace. The biggest hole in his analysis is the role played by work in the creation and maintenance of community. He sees work as the enemy of social capital – and calls for more flexible work to “reconcile the conflicting demands of work . . . and community”. The Saguaro seminars, set up to put some of the Bowling Alone ideas into practice, lament that “work, with its gruelling hours and traffic-snarled commutes, is taking over our lives and depriving us of time with family, friends and community”. But work is becoming a more important community. It is wrong to assume that work and community are necessarily “conflicting demands”. Work has changed.
In the golden era of social capital formation – the postwar years – work was routine, male and highly structured. People who wanted to spend time on interesting tasks with a like-minded group of people gravitated towards after-work activities. But work is not like that any more. Women and men work together. One-fifth of us meet our spouses or life-partners through work. Seven out of every ten men and nine out of ten women make lasting friendships at work. The amount of time at work spent interacting with other people has increased rapidly over the past few decades, as employment shifts into the service sector and “knowledge” industries.
Putnam’s view of community is geographically bounded; it is about the people and streets around where you live. The Social Capital Community Benchmark survey – designed to test Putnam’s ideas further – includes 11 questions, such as “how many of your neighbours’ first names do you know”, and “do you attend religious services”. But the place where people spend most of their waking hours – work – gets not a single mention.
Putnam is grieving for a certain kind of community that may not be relevant to the modern world. He is suffering from a kind of Neighbourhood Watch nostalgia. He ends up worshipping a world in which men did boring jobs while women baked cookies at home. He worries that people don’t even know who their neighbours are. But all that neighbours have in common is a postcode. People certainly know who their co-workers are, and they have much more in common with them. Look at the success of TV shows such as Ally McBeal, which is all about a community in the workplace. Putnam acutely observes the decline of old forms of community, but is blind to the new ones being constructed under his nose.
In his earlier work on social capital, Putnam discusses how social networks can support economically useful activities: he uses an example from Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club of a group of mah-jong-playing friends who form a joint investment association. But work can provide these foundations, too. In Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a group of work-based friends (who would score a resounding zero on all of Putnam’s measures of civic involvement) up sticks and launch a new software firm.
Bowling Alone also underestimates the power of informal friendship networks. Young people in the US or the UK are not less socially minded: just look at the armies of youngsters text messaging the locations of the hottest clubs. Friendship circles are more fluid than the membership of a particular organisation, and much harder to measure – but they are important creators of social capital just the same. The young are not “joiners” in the way their elders were – they are sceptical about becoming members of any organisation. But this does not mean they are not engaged in community-building of their own.
Putnam is right to say that society is better if built on strong social connections and communities. But he is wrong to suggest that those communities need to be founded on a shared location, a place of worship or a PTA. There is little evidence that people are less community-minded, less associative, less concerned for the welfare of others, or less sociable, than before. We are simply using different tools in different places to express our civic leanings. And work is chief among them. We might bowl alone, but we work together.
The author is the director of futures at the Industrial Society. His book Happy Mondays: putting the pleasure back into work is published by Pearson in May
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