[Updates
16/1/2022: In the title, I replaced 'disciplinary' with 'methodological' as there might be a misreading of the former's meaning;
17/1/2022: confirmed Frisinghelli and Schulteis as curators]
There have for several years been frequent media reports about the various harms caused by large social media enterprises, particularly Facebook. In spite of the alarm having been raised, occasionally by senior figures such as Sean Parker who warned of its effects on the brain, the businesses have kept on rolling and continue to do so in the face of horrifying testimony divulged by content moderators. In response, Facebook typically claims that the millions they have invested in research into the impact of well-being demonstrates a generally positive impact. Even if they were to pour billions more into their research, they would arguably reach the same conclusion. Why? Not because of a deliberate policy to evade, but because their research into well-being is based on ‘social capital’, a vaguely defined concept with flaky interpretations.
I had started drafting a section on this for my Jubilee Centre paper on virtues in the digital world. I wanted to highlight the considerable influence of this term, though the paper is mainly concerned with cognitive interventions to protect one’s awareness. I eventually omitted discussion of social capital because the paper was getting lengthy; I felt the need to include quite a bit of preparatory material to an audience unfamiliar with the Buddhist approach I was adopting.
Investigating the Origins of a Notion
So I introduce my thinking on social capital here, initially recapitulating the concern around academic notions, which I first expressed in a paper on sustainable social networking architectures I gave in 2010 (see bottom of first page), and then, in revised form, in Buddhism and Computing (chapter 5), which I largely quote here.
When delving into this, the first problem I came across was the lack of a standard definition, though a certain underlying pattern may be discerned in how systems have been built so far and it carries great significance. I am particularly grateful to Professor Alejandro Portes, former President of the American Sociological Association, for providing a very useful (and intelligible to me, a non-sociologist) historical overview in Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology. Portes observed that its sense has broadened from pertaining fundamentally to the individual and their family kinships – rooted in the foundational work of nineteenth century sociologists, particularly Émile Durkheim – to larger-scale social integration. He credits its first systematic treatment to Pierre Bourdieu, who defined it (for an individual) as
the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group…
(The Forms of Capital, page 21, or page 247 in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Richardson JG, editor).)
Portes illustrates how the research, whilst aspiring to social cohesion, has in fact given rise to many theories that appear equally to allow both positive and negative networks. The latter include “exclusion of outsiders, excess claims on group members, restrictions on individual freedoms, and downward leveling norms” (page 15). With definitions being vague or ambiguous, he observes that the personal concept of ‘social capital’ based on kinship relationships has gradually evolved to become more impersonal and more generalised.
Indeed, Bourdieu’s definition could be satisfied by many kinds of entities, including federated Internet-based software services, i.e., the systems in which the social capital is being established online. Whilst these services are like the close-fitting manifestations or shadows of human activity, they should not be equated with human relationships themselves – if you get to know someone by email, it is evidenced by a record of correspondence; but if you then meet in person, you do not need that record or email itself to continue developing the friendship.
The system logs are heavily identified with human activity, and with the interpersonal relationships themselves. Whilst this readily enables quantification and basic usage figures as garnered for analytics, much of the analysis needs careful interpretation and further in-depth enquiry, for which self-responses to a shopping list of questions are surely inadequate. It is thus unsurprising that the findings with regard to well-being are very mixed, even in the interpretation of identical data, giving the tech companies a great deal of wiggle room to convince (delude?) themselves that their systems really are conducive to well-being.
How then can we reach definite and meaningful conclusions about what is really of value? Let’s return to Bourdieu’s work. The quote above is actually a translation from the French:
Le capital social est l’ensemble des ressources actuelles ou potentielles qui sont liées à la possession d’un réseau durable de relations plus ou moins institutionnalisées d’interconnaissance et d’inter-reconnaissance, ou, en d’autres termes, à l’appartenance à un groupe …
The original was published six years earlier as
Le capital social: notes provisoires (Social Capital: Provisional Notes), which appeared in Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. 1980 Jan;31(1):2–3.
In strictly linguistic terms, the translation may be straightforward. However, the context of the definition is important, especially so with Bourdieu, because the interdisciplinary nature of his work is rooted in ethnography.
Images d’Algérie: An Exhibition of Ethnographic Photography
Bourdieu, born in 1930, was conscripted to the French army in 1955 and deployed to Algeria later that year, during the country’s growing struggles for independence from French colonial rule. He became increasingly disillusioned by the incongruity of the imposed European culture and sympathetic to the cause of self-determination. After being reassigned to a clerical role and meeting local scholars, he remained in the country during most of
the war, affording himself a rare opportunity to understand the local society
in situ. It was during this period, spurred on by a desire to constructively channel his feelings of resentment, that he undertook ethnographic work, particularly of the Kabyle people of Berber ethnicity, using photography as a tool.
This was a formational period for Bourdieu, very influential, according Goodman and Silverstein, in terms of his
cultivation of the relationship between theory and ethnography. I think this is very evident in a retrospective exhibition of about 150 ‘reunited’ photographs of his fieldwork, ‘PIERRE BOURDIEU: Images d’Algérie’ – une affinité élective’ (PIERRE BOURDIEU: Images of Algeria – Elective Affinities), hosted by the Chateau de Tours, 16 June 2012 – 4 November 2013. It was
featured in Jeu de Paume (magazine)
The introduction to the exhibition reads:
“The exhibition "Pierre Bourdieu. Images of Algeria" shows the photographic works of Pierre Bourdieu, taken during his fieldwork between 1958 and 1961, in the period of the war of liberation in Algeria. The exhibition places these photographic documents in the context of Bourdieu's ethnographic and sociological studies of that time. Bourdieu's pioneering field research, which is here supplemented by his own photographs, provides an insight into the development of his sociological tenets. In addition to illuminating the evolution of his work, the photographs are also impressive documents of social history, which — even after five decades — have lost none of their immediacy and relevance.”
The exhibition has indeed special relevance because it was proposed by Bourdieu towards the end of his career, reaffirming the importance of the ethnographic work 35-40 years after he had carried it out. Bourdieu asserted, “You have to see the photos to have a better understanding.” In
an enlightening ten-minute documentary, the curators, Christine Frisinghelli (Camera Austria, Graz) and Franz Schulteis (Fondation Bourdieu / University of Geneva), relate that when people came to see them, they’d keep “coming back to the same photo a dozen times, finding a dozen different things”.
The pictures open up access to a foreign culture and are furthermore linked to texts written by Bourdieu; reading the texts enables a better understanding of the photos, so they are mutually enhancing. For example, a series of photos featuring a village – the cottages and daily activities of the inhabitants – were really about social gatherings. In one photo, a group of children are collecting water from a fountain. This is significant because it was traditionally the role of women to act as water gatherers, but now women couldn’t leave the home anymore; it was considered a matter of honour that “women didn’t wander about unaccompanied in public and didn’t meet with foreigners”. So, they were disempowered, but this requires knowing the history. This kind of observation contributed to the empirical basis for the
theory of habitus that Bourdieu developed, specifically to internal views in social culture, whereby in the face of external colonisers, the locals applied a certain self-constraint in response.
What I find striking is the sympathetic nature of the processes by which these discoveries came about; for Bourdieu the use of photography was a means to express to people, “I am interested in you and your life, in your circumstances.” I think this disposition helped him understand, as reported by the curators, that observation and reflection change your outlook on life, allowing you to gain a deeper focus. In that very inclination, we have already a close linkage between subjective and objective, which, was central to his ideas of habitus. (Incidentally, I would have liked to have asked Bourdieu why is it that in some cultures people sit cross-legged, but not in others.)
Power as Capacity
In the light of Bourdieu’s fieldwork, social capital can obviously be seen in terms of empowerment. In English, ‘power’ is all too readily associated with politics, but – despite his considerable interest in power relations – that wasn’t necessarily the root intention for Bourdieu. As the narrative accompanying the photography exhibition indicates, he was working somewhat like an archaeologist, identifying and peeling off the incongruent layers of European colonial culture to allow the native culture to breathe again.
This perspective is confirmed in Notes Provisoires, which he wrote twenty years later, discussing how social capital is developed in a group context. In explaining the durable aspect of social capital, Bourdieu makes particular use of the word le pouvoir (‘power’):
… grâce à ce capital collectivement possédé, un pouvoir sans rapport avec son apport personnel, chaque agent participe du capital collectif, symbolisé par le nom de la famille ou de la lignée, mais en proportion directe de son apport, c’est-à-dire dans la mesure où ses actions, ses paroles, sa personne font honneur au groupe
Google Translate renders this (with my minor corrections) as:
… then thanks to this collectively owned capital, a power unrelated to their personal contribution, each agent participates in the collective capital, symbolized by the name of the family or lineage, but in direct proportion to his contribution, that is to say to the extent that his actions, words, and person honour the group
This is very much about agency. When learning French in secondary school in the 1980s, thanks to one of my teachers, I became more aware that it has this sense of ‘capability’ or ‘capacity’; my contemporaneous Collins Robert English-French/French-English dictionary (a reprint of the 1st edition, 1979) gives as the noun’s first entry:
pouvoir (faculté) (gén) power; (capacité) ability, capacity; (Phys, gén: propriété). avoir le ~ de faire to have the power ou ability to do; il a le ~ de se faire des amis partout he has the ability to make friends everywhere; il a un extraordinaire ~ d’éloquence/de conviction he has remarkable ou exceptional powers of oratory/persuasion; ce n’est pas en mon ~ it is not within ou in my power; it is beyond my power; il n’est pas en son ~ de vous aider it is beyond ou it does not lie within his powers to help you; il fera tout ce qui est en son ~ he will do everything (that is) in his power ou all that can possibly be done; ~ couvrant/éclairant covering/lighting power; ~ absorbant absorption power, absorption factor.
That entry says quite a lot about one’s capacity to form relationships. It’s really important (in my view). Taking le pouvoir as a natural capacity to do things, in a society where even simple daily activities are constrained, the meaning is inevitably coloured, so that one has to struggle to have what should be naturally-given pouvoir. Hence the ‘power relations’ and the political overtones, especially those of control, which came to preoccupy Bourdieu so deeply and for which he perceived a deficit in sociological theories that he sought to remedy. Nevertheless, I perceive that Bourdieu maintains the primary sense of pouvoir, as given in Collins-Robert; it should be borne in mind that it relates to human agency, which, I believe, is fundamental to our sense of freedom and ability to grow. Just as luminosity is primarily defined by the sun and not by clouds, so pouvoir as capacity should precede the sense of power and authority, which are more properly conveyed by another term I learnt as a child, la puissance.
Yet, that meaning seems to have been supplanted by what Collins-Robert gives as the second sense (
autorité). Now, in the Collins dictionary, we have as
the primary definition:
(= influence, autorité) power
Le Premier ministre a beaucoup de pouvoir. The prime minister has a lot of power.
avoir pouvoir de faire (= autorisation) to have the authority to do ⧫ to have authority to do; (= droit) to have the right to do
The meaning seems to have become the equivalent of the English word, ‘power’. Quite a change! A result of globalisation, perhaps?
Lost in Translation?
As his influence grew, Bourdieu became troubled that his ideas were being widely misinterpreted; their cultural translation to the English-speaking world was proving particularly problematic. In a lecture delivered in French at the University of California, San Diego, in March of 1986, reproduced in Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1987, pp. 147-166, and translated from the French by Loic J. D. Wacquant), he opened with (emphasis mine):
I would like, within the limits of a lecture, to try and present the theoretical principles which are at the base of the research whose results are presented in my book Distinction (Bourdieu 1984a), and draw out those of its theoretical implications that are most likely to elude its readers, particularly here in the United States, due to the differences between our respective cultural and scholarly traditions
A couple of paragraphs later he determined:
I think that it is particularly necessary to set the record straight here: indeed, the hazards of translation are such that, for instance, my book Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) is well known, which will lead certain commentators…
As a disciplinary outsider, it’s not practical for me to work through his large output, in the original or in translation, which is why the exhibition catalogue is so valuable. Another entry point is
Choses dites, one of the main compendia of Bourdieu’s work, in which he tries to reassess and clarify. Not having it to hand, I’ve consulted
an extended review by Dick McCleary, whose own
life appears well-travelled.
But I have to admit I don’t feel much wiser. That may be due to my denseness or the lack of clarity on the part of the reviewer, but I suspect that it’s more the verbal expressions, where definitions are imprecise and wrapped up in very involved discourse (a different world from my background of mathematics). For example, having watched and listened to the ethnographic photography exhibition, I feel I have a tentative understanding of habitus, at least in a very simple form, but when I turn to McCleary’s account, in which he quotes verbatim from (Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice, p. 124), it’s another matter.
In the more general sense it has in the 'symbolic economy' which has been Bourdieu's chief concern, capital consists in the power to control and use the means and social mechanisms required for cultural production to shape perception and understanding in accordance with the shapers' views and interests. The differential distribution of all forms of capital among agents and groups of agents determines their position in the social space of dominant and dominated classes. Their position in turn determines their habitus – the 'system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures [which constitutes] the socially informed body, with its tastes and distastes, its compulsions and repulsions … '
I find the basic notion of capital straightforward enough, but the subsequent expression rambling and nebulous. Such material is evidently difficult to elucidate, but I feel there’s too much wrapped up together. It needs unpacking, a proper separation of concerns.
Returning to our original focus of social networking sites, this lack of clarity and succinctness very likely underlies problems with the definition of [social] capital and its current application to the online context. However, the content also provides important guidance that should inform solutions. In The Forms of Capital, Bourdieu adds a footnote to the definition of social capital (emphasis own).
Here too the notion of cultural capital did not spring from pure theoretical work, still less from an analogical extension of economic concepts. It arose from the need to identify the principle of social effects which, although they can be seen clearly at the level of singular agents—where statistical inquiry inevitably operates—cannot be reduced to the set of properties individually possessed by a given agent.
I would reinforce what Bourdieu is intimating and assert that the notions he puts forward can barely be understood without attending to the practical context over an extended period; the visuals informed his analysis deeply after due reflection. It confirms for me that it is unrealistic to think that one can gain more than a shallow insight into social capital generated by people’s online activities through usage analytics and surveys alone.
We are left then with only the more obvious manifestations, as with the political activities, which have very marked patterns online. Unfortunately, these are well-known for having fostered ills ranging from addiction to division and hatred (hateful speech), leading to mounting experiences of dissatisfaction, i.e., of negative capital, with perceived
powers of corruption and nefarious control. The promotion of social capital by the big tech companies then seems ironic given that the main driver for Bourdieu’s research was the struggles of the Algerian people against French colonialism – an oppressive regime or system that artificially constrains, diminishing real autonomy and agency.
With the notions of social capital are so vague and diluted, it is difficult to go beyond the broad-brush macro analyses with its ham-fisted metrics such as page impressions, ‘likes’ and so on. We are unlikely to build a compassionate society by these means, which is why we need fresh insights and radically new solutions. We need metta, not Meta …
Glimpses of a Buddhist Response
Bourdieu has demonstrated that both the subjective and objective are needed for a proper understanding of habitus. In that regard, Bourdieu discusses the senses; continuing with McCleary’s quote above,
the socially informed body, with its tastes and distastes, its compulsions and repulsions, with, in a word, all its senses not only the traditional five senses, but also the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sense of direction and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the sense of beauty, common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical sense and the sense of responsibility, business sense and the sense of propriety, the sense of humour and the sense of absurdity, moral sense and the sense of practicality, and so on'.
The five physical senses (eye and sights, ear and sounds, tongue and tastes, body and tactile objects, nose and smells) are extended by a list that relate to perceptions, sensitivities and more general views – to properly encompass social capital, one needs deep understanding of the subjective human experience and inclinations, motivating cognitive science, which is central to
my recent paper.
From a Buddhist perspective, to the five sense bases and sense organs is added the sixth sense of mind (mano) and mental objects (dhammā), which together comprise the saḷāyatana. The list may then be approached in terms of conditioned states – the five khandhas (‘heaps’) of form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness – and as dependently arisen processes mediated through the senses: with contact through a sense, feeling arises and consciousness of that. From feelings, arise perceptions, which in turn condition and are conditioned by mental formations. These mental formations constitute the habitus, but our interest is not so much in the detail of these formations, but rather in the ethical quality of associated actions in body, speech in mind – for these are the determinants of wellbeing. Are they pure or impure?
“What is good, what is bad? What is right, what wrong? What ought I to do or not to do? What, when I have done it, will be for a long time my sorrow ... or my happiness?”
A foundation for the moral sense that Bourdieu identified is termed
sīla (moral virtue), which is typically grouped in a threefold mode of practice –
dāna (generosity),
sīla and
samādhi (mental concentration). So, a Buddhist approach to social capital concerns the cultivation of these three.
Buddhist teachings do take account of the social context, particularly in the understanding of human relationships. The
pouvoir to form relationships is expounded in the
Sigalovāda Sutta. It covers the various kinds of relationships that Bourdieu mentions, but the value is in becoming a more virtuous position. Accordingly, this forms the
basis of my architecture for Sigala SNS. It is underpinned by agency, for which in Buddhism is characterised as an autonomous person who can exercise six qualities – initiation, effort, exertion, steadfastness, perseverance and endeavouring, as described in the
Attakārī Sutta (teachings on the self-doer).
The Buddha also described another kind of capital,
spiritual capital –
puñña (merit), which deserves its own blog post. It too can translate into economic gain through
karma-vipaka (karmic fruits), but regarded spiritually, it is able to create conditions to support deliverance from
Samsara.
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