Social capital theorizing and the holism-individualism debate in the study of health in social context


Valerie Haines, University of Calgary

Social capital theorizing offers a powerful tool for moving away from individualist approaches that treat individuals as the single important level of analysis and their attributes as the only explanatory variables. It is no surprise, then, that it has made significant inroads into the study of health in social context, despite an ongoing controversy about the proper referent of social capital centered on the question of whether social capital inheres at the individual level, is a property of collectives or resides at both levels. The persistence of this controversy and widespread agreement that resolving it is key to realizing the promise of social capital theorizing in health research suggest that now is an opportune time to explore two questions. Why have participants in the controversy yet to reach a satisfactory resolution? What might such a resolution look like? I approach these questions by shifting to the metatheoretical level, using the relationship between individual and society, agency and structure to problematize the terms in which the controversy about the proper referent of social capital is it set. I begin by returning to the holismindividualism debate in the philosophy of social science: first, to identify reductionist/atomistic individualism as the “individualism” targeted by participants in the controversy and second, to outline key elements of three competing metatheories that challenge this way of understanding social life—nonreductionist/nonatomistic individualism, holism and relational thinking. Because the focus of the controversy about the proper referent of social capital is the causal significance of social structures, I deploy Giddens’ strategy of methodological bracketing and hold agency in suspension. Next, I offer outline accounts of appropriated social capital theories, grouped by the metatheories they instantiate. These accounts prepare the way for the main part of my paper where I reconstruct the controversy as a succession of resolutions reached by working within terms set in a false individualism-holism dichotomy. The first resolution theorizes social capital solely as properties of collectivities understood as entities sui generis that have emergent properties and causal influence that cannot (in principle) be explained by individuals and their social relations. The second resolution expands the reach of the concept to the very thing appropriated social capital theories agree that social capital is not: an attribute of individuals. The third and now dominant resolution further expands the reach of the concept to properties of personal networks to recognize two distinct schools of social capital. The social cohesion school integrates the first two resolutions by studying social capital that inheres in collectivities and attributes of individuals that reference social cohesion. The network school studies social capital that inheres in personal networks. But because the individualism-holism dichotomy is in play, social capital that is not a property of collectivities must inhere at the individual level and this includes social capital that inheres in personal networks. Like earlier resolutions, the two distinct schools resolution does not align with appropriated social capital theorizing on what social capital is and what social capital is not. As a result, it too is an unsatisfactory resolution of the controversy about the proper referent of social capital. To suggest what a satisfactory resolution might look like I take the false dichotomy out of play by bringing in the relationist alternative to both reductionist/atomistic individualism and holism. I distinguish “property of personal social network” from “attribute of individual” and “weak/relational emergence” from “strong emergence” to theorize properties of personal networks as always constraining and enabling but never autonomous or determining. The result is a way of reconfiguring the terms of the controversy about the proper referent of social capital that narrows the referent of the concept of social capital to properties of collectivities and properties of personal networks. I use my conclusion to suggest that at the same time returning to the holism-individualism debate helps resolve the controversy that motivated this paper, it raises issues of microfoundations and what addressing microfoundations may mean for when to take agency out of suspension in the search for mechanisms explaining health effects of social capital that inheres in collectivities and personal networks.

This paper will be presented at the following session: