Social capital is a relatively new concept compared to welfare, though debates on the advantages of different welfare regimes and the links between state provision and social participation are tentatively connecting the two areas. Esping-Andersen classifies welfare regimes into three types - market-focused liberal, status-focused corporatist, and equality-focused social democratic regimes. Each has been well studied with regards to the effects of commodification (market dependency), stratification (inequality and stigma), and familialisation (paternalistic family dependency). However, such focus largely upon economic rather than social concerns. This thesis examines the proposition that welfare can ???build society??? by promoting these social aspects otherwise known as social capital. The social capital concept has definition and measurement problems with causality and the capture of social activities rather than just norms. Acknowledging, this, social capital is preferably defined from the literature as norms of trust, networks of association membership, and practices of volunteering and socialising. A critical reading highlights the importance of separating bonding social capital, as captured in Bourdieu and Coleman???s exclusive networks, from bridging social capital, more akin to Putnam???s civil society and thus closer to social welfare. This thesis examines numerous empirical measures of bridging social capital, by looking at norms and networks through the World Values Survey, and practices through the Multinational Time Use Study across nine OECD countries. Results show that social democratic welfare regimes do promote social capital, with high levels of trust, membership and social activity. Corporatist welfare regimes show low but constant levels of social capital, whilst liberal welfare regimes have experienced declines in trust. Increasingly means-tested liberal regimes register high levels of commodification, with poor work-leisure balances, and are also more stratified with higher levels of inequality, whilst attitudes stigmatising immigrants and the poor are apparent amongst all less trusting countries. Familialisation is explicit in corporatist values and male/female work imbalances, and implicit in liberal values and poor family payments, with reduced social capital contributions from women as a result. Overall empirical testing of relations between welfare regimes and social capital show that both are linked most positively under universal rather than meanstested conditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/215474 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Patulny, Roger, Social Policy Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Sociology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Roger Vincent Patulny, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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