Sunday, 05 December 2004

Halpern on social capital, coming soon, er?

I've been looking forward to getting my inky digits on David Halpern's book on social capital, a long time coming. The Sunday Times trailed it back in early March, with publication due in June.

According to Blackwells it was published 31 October. They descibe it as being published by 'Blackwell Publishers Polity Press.' A few weeks ago I pottered along to their Charing Cross Road shop, expecting to have copies falling off the shelves at me. No sir, we don't have it in stock.

You published it, I said, with a hint of a question mark at the end there.

Yes sir but I'm afraid we don't seem to have ordered it.

I scurried home and ordered it from Blackwells Online. From whom I have just heard today by email: "We're sorry, however despite our best efforts the publisher has not yet supplied the title you ordered. As a result your order delivery date has been extended."

Meanwhile Amazon, bless them, say "this hard-to-find title is subject to an additional handling charge," and it will take 4-6 weeks. Polity say it was published 15 October, all 400 pages of it.

Does this book exist? A different form of capitalism appears to be influencing its availability. Will I find an unthumbed review copy second hand before the original reaches me? David, any clues?

5 Dec 2004 21:48:52 | Social capital

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Neighbouring: review of evidence They've been busy at the Centre for Neighbourhood Research with four new working papers released here, including an important literature review by Gary Bridge, Ray Forrest and Emma Holland. Minor whinge: the usefulness of the work is slightly diminished by the usual disregard for a bit of editing that we always seem to get with semi-published papers like this. In this case, several of the works cited are not listed in the references, which is a bit unfortunate in a literature review. Someone buy these folk some decent citation software. Two points stood out for me from the concluding remarks: "Important to the quality of neighbourly relations is the degree of control that an individual can exercise both over the varying levels and intensity of contact and in the way that neighbourly relations function within the overall array of a person's social network." And: "There is an under-representation of detailed qualitative work that investigate(s) the mechanisms of neighbourliness."
PREVIOUS POST
The original space of flows I gave a presentation on neighbourhoods last week in Eindhoven, at a sem inar on social quality and the information society. I've been tinkering with a historical perspective on the ways in which neighbours communicate with each other, partly reflected in a post here on community memory. I began by looking at the perceived crisis in civil and neighbourly relations, where there seem to be fewer opportunities to be neighbourly, and disagreements too easily become conflicts. We don't always seem to have the mechanisms and opportunities for resolving these conflicts, and thus for example people resort to putting signs in the street reprimanding others about litter or parking. A glance at the traditional English ‘close-knit’ community reminds us of a past where most people knew one another, and their social networks overlapped a great deal. Of course, such a social environment could be stifling and very unpleasant, but we can easily see how communication between neighbours was lubricated by frequent interaction in the street, in the workplace, in the pub, at school, at the football match or at the church. Moving on we glanced at the influence of the car on neighbourhood relations - a lot of damage there - and the more mixed influence of television. We noted also the ways in which some technologies - the system of coaching inns and stables in nineteenth century England, or postboxes and phone boxes in the 20th - represented the connection between a neighbourhood and the wider world: the former characterised by human interaction as people descended from the coach to warm themselves and share news from other towns while the horses were changed; the latter characterised by their human scale architecture and their privacy of communication. This lead me on to suggesting that what we may lack today is the sense of readily available common repositories for local community memory. It's as if what we're left with is no longer fulfilling the role of shoring-up everyday lives, of giving form to neighbourhood life. Hence the importance of resources for community narratives – including informal gathering places like the school gates or the corner shop. I then referred to the e-neigbours and i-neighbours initiatives that Keith Hampton has kicked off at MIT, and the rest will become history. This perspective suggests that we may be living in a ‘dark age’ of community communication, where at the moment we have neither the benefit of dense overlapping networks in our neighbourhoods, nor the potential of an online resource for the accretion of community memory. There's stacks more to go into this, such as the 'isolating impulse' expressed in the use of personal stereos, shaded car windows, a non-conversational cash machine, how we feel about gated communities, and so on. Give me time.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments