Theor Soc (2006) 35:529563

DOI 10.1007/s11186-006-9017-6

Social capital or group style? Rescuing Tocquevilles

insights on civic engagement
Paul Lichterman

Published online: 11 November 2006

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract Social capital has become the preeminent concept for studying civic
relationships, yet it will not help us assess their meanings, institution-like qualities,
or potential for social capacity. Alexis de Tocquevilles insights on these three features
of civic relationships continue to be highly influential, and the popular social capital
concept claims a strongly Tocquevillian heritage while systematically missing what a
Tocquevillian imagination illuminates. Scenes from volunteer group settings in a
midwestern US city show how a concept of group style apprehends the varying
meanings, routines, and social capacities of civic ties. Group style also illuminates the
process by which civic groups create bridging ties beyond the group. Without
rejecting the social capital concept entirely, I highlight research questions and findings
that social capital would ignore or misapprehend. A concluding discussion draws out
implications for democratic theory, and sketches an agenda for future research on civic
group style that makes good on Tocquevillian insights while moving beyond
Tocquevilles own limits.

A difficult marriage
In just 13 years, political scientist Robert Putnams version of the social capital concept has
generated a hefty edifice of research on civic engagement, many columns worth of social
commentary, and a steady stream of penetrating criticisms. References to social capital have
diffused phenomenally, as researchers continue to argue that the troika of social capitals components social networks, norms of reciprocity and trust empower social activism, boost local

P. Lichterman (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, MC 2539, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

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volunteering, and help diverse people work together for public goods.1 The great outpouring
of studies boosts the notion that civic engagement and perhaps democracy itself depend on solid
stocks of social capital. At the same time, commentators continue to take sharp aim at the social
capital concepts own logical consequences, its potential for circularity or internal incoherence.2
Others say the concept too easily deflects inconvenient moral or political questions, or that it is
an ideological Trojan horse poised to overtake critical thinking about civic engagement with
the ultimate weapon a market metaphor.3 A third camp has debated Putnams widely circulated
argument that social capital in the United States drained away as voluntary association
memberships declined after the late 1960s.4 And others criticize the implications in Putnams
1
For Putnams early reference to social capital, see Robert Putnam, Making democracy work: Civic traditions in
modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); for a later work that popularized a similar definition of
social capital, see Robert Putnam, Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2000). In the study of religious groups alone the subject of this paper Putnams social
capital concept has spread widely. On the consequences of social capital for churches and religious community
groups, see for instance Nancy Ammerman, Congregation and community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1997); John Bartkowski and Helen Regis, Charitable choices: Religion, race and poverty in the postwelfare era (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Penny Edgell Becker and Pawan H. Dhingra,
Religious involvement and volunteering: Implications for civil society, Sociology of Religion 62 (2001): 315
335; J. Z. Park and Christian Smith, To whom much has been given...: Religious capital and community
voluntarism among churchgoing protestants, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39 (2000):272286;
Mark Chaves, Helen Giesel, and William Tsitsos, Religious variations in public presence: Evidence from the
National Congregations Study, 108128, in Robert Wuthnow and John Evans, editors, The quiet hand of God:
Faith-based activism and the public role of mainline Protestantism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002); Ram A. Cnaan with Stephanie C. Boddie, Femida Handy, Caynor Yancey, and Richard Schneider, The
invisible caring hand: American congregations and the provision of welfare (New York: New York University
Press, 2002); Mark R. Warren, Dry bones rattling: Community building to revitalize American democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Corwin Smidt (Ed.), Religion as social capital (Waco: Baylor
University Press, 2003); Richard Wood, Faith in action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Religious
culture and political action, Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 307332.
2
On circular reasoning in the social capital framework, see John Wilson, Dr. Putnams Social Lubricant,
Contemporary Sociology 30 (2001): 225227; Alejandro Portes, Social capital: Its origins and applications in
modern sociology, Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998):124. Robert Fishman observed that social capital may
be operationalized in diffuse, varied ways yet connotes a conceptual whole. See Robert Fishman, Democracys
voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
3
On the missing moral questions, see Amitai Etzioni, Is bowling together sociologically lite? Contemporary
Sociology 30 (2001): 223224. On the political inadequacy of the social capital framework, see Robert Edwards
and Michael Foley, Much ado about social capital, Contemporary Sociology 30 (2001): 227230. See
Stephen Smith and Jessica Kulynych, It may be social, but why is it capital? The social construction of social
capital and the politics of language, Politics and Society 30 (2002): 149186, for the same criticism of social
capital that capitalisms most famous critic made of capitalism: It imposes a falsely universalizing logic on
relationships political ones in this case and it distorts our understanding of the social world. For the view
that social capital is a metaphorical Trojan horse bearing neoliberal assumptions, see Margaret Somers, Beware
trojan horses bearing social capital: How privatization turned solidarity into a bowling team, 233274, in
George Steinmetz (Ed.), The politics of method in the human sciences (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
4
For the debate about those figures, see Jean Cohen, American civil society talk, 5585, in Robert Fullinwider
(Ed.), Civil society, democracy, and civic renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Bob Edwards
and Michael Foley (Eds.), American Behavioral Scientist 40, special issue on Social capital, civil society and
contemporary democracy (MarchApril 1997); Robert Wuthnow, Loose connections: Joining together in
Americas fragmented communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1998); Robert Fullinwider
(Ed.), Civil society, democracy, and civic Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,1999); Andrew
Greeley, Coleman revisited: Religious structures as a source of social capital, American Behavioral Scientist 40
(1997): 587594; Michael Schudson, The good citizen: A history of American civic life (New York: Martin
Kessler Books, 1998); Theda Skocpol, Unraveling from above, American Prospect 25 (MarchApril 1996);
Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina, (Ed.), Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington D.C. and
New York: Brookings Institution and Russsell Sage,1999); Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan,
Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life, updated
edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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531

work that civic groups often cultivate the democratic sensibilities that count as social capital to
begin with.5
Informed by this critical discussion yet alive to the value of research that has used
Putnams social capital concept, my inquiry goes in a different direction. I ask what purchase
we get on civic engagement with the social capital concept. Is it what civic engagement
scholars intended to buy? To address this question we need to bring back into the conversation the theorist invoked most frequently as the inspiration for this notion of social capital
Alexis de Tocqueville. After all the critiques, we still need to find out if this version of the concept
can capture the features of civic association that would matter most in the Tocquevillian imagination. Is the marriage of Tocquevillian thinking and Putnams social capital concept basically
sound, even if it has given birth to a gaggle of logical, empirical, and ideological issues?
I argue it is not. My discussion treats only Putnams version of social capital, since James
Colemans older formulation and Pierre Bourdieus quite different notion have had less direct
influence to date on the recent upsurge of civic engagement studies.6 Putnams social capital
tries to turn a qualitative, Tocquevillian argument about meaningful, dynamic relationships
into a quantifiable argument about the density of groups, individual acts, attitudes and
behaviors. Yet, the qualitative argument slips in the back door of Putnams research on US
civic life. We ought to unhitch Tocqueville from Putnams social capital concept and
choose an alternative concept that can do the work that social capital tries to do but cannot.
Why even make the case? Why not allow the social capital concept a harmless rhetorical
flourish? It is not because Tocquevilles own concepts are adequate to investigating modern
civic life, and certainly not that his claims always ring true either for his own time or ours.7
5
These works, though, usually do not critique the social capital concept itself. See Michael Young, Tocquevilles
America: A critical reappraisal of voluntary associations before the civil war, paper presented at the annual meetings
of the American Sociological Association, Anaheim, CA, 2001, for an argument that some of the most important civic
associations in the US antebellum period were aggressive cultural warriors, trying to impose their vision of social
organization across American civic life. See Hyeong-Ki Kwon, Associations, civic norms, and democracy: Revisiting the Italian case, Theory and Society 33 (2004):135166, for evidence that the Italian fascist movement rose
rapidly in those regions of Italy shown as having had a dense associational life in Putnam, Making democracy work.
For a critical view of German civic associations of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, see Sheri
Berman, Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic, World Politics 49 (1997): 401429. For a study of
entrenched social and cultural differences in nineteenth century American social clubs and mutual aid societies, see
Jason Kaufman, For the Common good? American civic life and the golden age of fraternity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002). Kaufman deduces a stark challenge to the argument that associationalism can [join]
disparate populations together in fellowship and solidarity (p. 8), the argument he ascribed to Robert Putnam.
6

A review of social capital concepts stretches beyond the bounds of this article. For a good discussion of the
different concepts, see Nan Lin, Social capital: A theory of social structure and action (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); on the differences between Bourdieus concept and Colemans, which more obviously
influences Putnam, see Smith and Kulynych, It may be social, but why is it capital?. For a view of civic
engagement that does prefer Colemans concept to Putnams, see Greeley, Coleman revisited. For an extensive
inventory of social capital studies, especially outside the field of civic engagement, see Michael Woolcock, Social
capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework, Theory and Society 27
(1998): 151208.
7
Regarding Tocquevilles own time, see Michael Young, Tocquevilles America, Confessional Protest: The
religious birth of US national social movements, American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 660688. Students of
contemporary US civic life often affirm the suggestion in Tocquevilles writings that civic groups cultivate broad
social ties, but this claim too is challenged in recent research. See Omar McRoberts, Streets of glory: Church and
community in a black urban district (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Wuthnow, Mobilizing
civic engagement: The changing impact of religious involvement, 331363, in Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina
(Ed.), Civic engagement in American democracy (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), Bridging the privileged and
the marginalized? 59102, in Robert Putnam (Ed.), Democracies in flux: The evolution of social capital in
contemporary society (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Lichterman, Elusive
togetherness: Church groups trying to bridge America's divisions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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It is partly because, for many social researchers, Tocquevilles writings are more than
decorative rhetoric. As political theorist Mark Warren observes,8 Tocquevilles Democracy
in America established the conceptual channels for much of the subsequent scholarship on
civic associations, including studies using the social capital concept. Many writers both
sympathetic to and skeptical of Tocqueville justify their attention to civic groups by
reference to Tocquevilles claims about these groups society-building potentials.9 Whether
we affirm, dispute, or are indifferent to Tocquevilles famous claims, they are a fair gauge
for assessing the social capital concept on its own terms. Aware of the distance between
Tocquevillian claims and the social capital concepts ability to grasp them, we can make
more careful, self-conscious analytic choices. We may decide whether we want to retrieve
Tocquevillian questions and insights that disappear inside the social capital concept instead
of assuming that by studying social capital we already have addressed them. One reason for
unhitching Tocqueville from social capital, then, is to make our use of Tocqueville more
clear and consistent. Another important reason is to advance our empirical grasp of civic
engagement. Unhitching Tocqueville, we may make Tocquevilles empirical claims more
accountable on their own terms once they no longer suffer a rough translation into the
language of social capital.
One of Tocquevilles most famous empirical claims had to do with the power of civic
interaction. If social capital is a good modern proxy for Tocquevilles sometimes vague and
normative pronouncements about the process inside civic groups, then the concept should
grasp what would be the most salient outcomes of that process in the Tocquevillian
imagination. Only a study that investigates everyday interaction and its outcomes closely
can access this dimension of Tocquevilles sprawling argument, and tell us whether the
social capital concept tracks Tocquevillian insights adequately.
For over 3 years, I listened closely to interaction in nine, religiously sponsored
community service groups and projects, and observed their efforts to create ties beyond the
group, in the midwestern, mid-sized city of Lakeburg.10 Church-based service networks
initiated the Lakeburg groups and projects as responses to the welfare policy reforms of
1996. I watched to see how churchgoers would define their roles and relationships in a
newly uncertain institutional environment. Local church-sponsored, county-assisted
volunteering is an appropriate field for investigating Putnams neo-Tocquevillian version
of the social capital concept up close. In cultural terms, volunteering is one of the modal
forms of local civic engagement in the contemporary United States. While 50 years ago
many Americans would have associated civic involvement with the diffuse, long-term, local
boosterism of the club woman and the organization man, the dominant meaning of
civic involvement today is embodied in the volunteer who carries out specific, short-term
tasks for a particular issue or charitable campaign, often under the direction of a non-profit

Mark E. Warren, Democracy and association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

For a representative sample of works on civic engagement that invoke Tocqueville, affirmingly or
critically, see Berman, Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic; Harry Boyte and Sara M.
Evans, Free spaces: The sources of democratic change in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Nina
Eliasoph, Avoiding politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kaufman, For the common
good?; Skocpol and Fiorina, Civic engagement in American democracy; Mark E. Warren, Democracy and
association; Mark R. Warren, Dry bones rattling; Wood, Faith in action; Wuthnow, Loose connections; Acts
of compassion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Young, Tocquevilles America.
10

See Lichterman, Elusive togetherness. This and all group names and personal names are pseudonyms.

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professional specialist who organizes volunteer time-slots.11 By the numbers, too, local
church-based volunteering is a good candidate for this inquiry. Roughly half of Americans
volunteering takes place in a religious context and almost half of Americans association
memberships are church related.12 Volunteering also is one of the few forms of civic
engagement that increased between the 1970s and the 1990s,13 and probably for that reason
Putnam put some of his own hopes for American civic life in a new volunteerism that might
be animating young adults today.
Here, I re-conceptualize ethnographic material and treat much previously unanalyzed
field-note evidence on two of the volunteer projects and one ongoing volunteer group.14 I
show that a focus on group style helps us grasp systematically the meanings and patterns of
everyday interaction that would matter in the Tocquevillian imagination but elude the neoTocquevillian social capital concept. If we study group style instead of social capital, we
discover why at least one extremely common form of civic engagement in the United
States, plug-in style volunteering, often may not measure up well to Tocquevilles vision of
civic process. Plug-in style volunteering may even stunt the social ties that the social capital
concept aims to count.
To be very clear at the outset: This is no argument against the value of quantitative
evidence for studying civic engagement. It is a matter of measuring well what we claim to
measure. Social capital researchers deserve credit for trying to make Tocquevilles vague
arguments empirically tractable, applicable to contemporary civic life. For present purposes,
any distance between Tocquevillian intentions and the measures of social capital matter
mainly if Putnams concept really carries those intentions, and if measures of social capital
really do miss features of civic engagement that a Tocquevillian imagination could grasp
features that matter greatly to contemporary researchers. I show that both are true. The
social capital concept does not need Tocquevilles heritage to do work for social science.15
For the sake of both the Tocquevillian imagination and Putnams social capital concept, a
divorce would be the best thing.
Following a brief, selective review of Tocquevilles own, well-trod argument on the
social power of civic process, I unpack the Tocquevillian influences on Putnams social
capital concept and show how the concept tries to operationalize Tocquevilles insights.
Succeeding sections attend closely to group style in local volunteer activity in order to
pinpoint the social capital concepts inconsistencies and silences. Rather than simply reject
the social capital concept, I compare it with group style to highlight research questions and
findings that social capital cannot grasp but that would matter to many scholars of civic life.
The neo-Tocquevillian social capital concept still has its uses, but it undercuts its
Tocquevillian aspirations. A concluding discussion suggests some implications of my
argument for democratic theory and sketches an agenda for future research on group styles
that moves beyond the limits in both the social capital concept and Tocquevilles own
claims about American civic groups.

11
12

Wuthnow, Loose connections.

Putnam, Bowling alone, 66, and chapter 4 in general.

13

Ibid., 128.

14

For details on the larger study, see Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness.

See, for instance, Woolcock, Social capital and economic development, but see also the global critique
of the concept in Somers, Beware Trojan horses bearing social capital.
15

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From civic community to social capital

The spirit of Tocqueville: Meaningful relationships, instituted action, and social capacity
Communitarians, liberal political theorists, pragmatists, and radical democrats read
Tocqueville in different ways,16 but all converge on one sentence from Democracy in
America that lauds the process inside civic groups: Feelings and ideas are renewed, the
heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one
upon another.17 In Tocquevilles view, civic groups did more than introduce individuals to
new ideas or help them accomplish goals that would be hard to pursue individually
important as these were. He thought they would teach citizens how to do things together
with a widening circle of others, heightening their sense of membership in and
responsibility for a larger social world. Broadening members horizons of collaboration,
civic groups would empower citizens as knowledgeable, skilled, and sometimes wary
partners in a social contract that might otherwise grant too much de facto power to the state.
While other social theorists in the past hundred years have made a parallel argument,18
Tocqueville still is the most prominent single theoretical muse for social capital; Robert
Putnam called him the patron saint of social capitalists.19 It helps to identify three features
in the Tocquevillian imagination of civic life before scanning their influence on the social
capital concept.
First, Tocqueville emphasized meaningful relationships that people develop and
transform in the course of interaction in civic groups. Through the reciprocal action of
men one upon another peoples imaginations would grow bigger. Through that process,
civic relationships would take on new definitions and purposes. The mores of narrowly selfinterested action would expand into self-interest properly understood. 20 It is not that civic
16

A review of these different readings of Tocqueville goes beyond my purposes here. Radical democratic
thinkers who affirm some aspects of Tocquevilles legacy include Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers,
Secondary associations and democratic governance, Politics and Society 20 (1992): 393472; Archon
Fung and Erik O. Wright, Thinking about empowered participatory governance, 344, in Archon Fung and
Erik O. Wright (Eds.), Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory
governance (London: Verso, 2003); Eliasoph, Avoiding politics. For communitarians who cite Tocqueville
approvingly, see Amitai Etzioni, The new golden rule: Community and morality in a democratic society
(New York: Basic, 1996); Francis Fukuyama, The great disruption: Human nature and the reconstitution of
social order (New York: Free, 1999). For liberal political theorists who name Tocqueville among their
reference points, see John A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison (Cambridge: Polity,
1995); Amy Gutmann, Freedom of association (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pragmatist
thinker John Dewey referred to Tocqueville in The Public and its problems (Denver: Allan Swallow, 1927).
17

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969[1835]), 515.

18

Emile Durkheim wrote that a healthy society hosts a congeries of "secondary groups that drag individuals
into the general torrent of social life. See The division of labor in society (New York: Free, 1933[1902]),
28. Civic and professional associations would generate in their members a sense of the greater social good
and prepare their representatives to deliberate in large assemblies; see Professional ethics and civic morals
(Glencoe, IL: Free, 1957). In a quite different tradition, social philosopher John Dewey wrote that a national,
great community could come into being when local civic groups helped citizens discover their place in the
bigger picture. Dewey put his democratic faith in civic groups as a counterweight to the corporate power that
already loomed menacingly in his picture of Americas still inchoate national community. See Dewey, The
public and its problems. Putnam affirms a Deweyan sensibility behind his attention to voluntary associations
and refers to Deweys democratic distinction between doing with and doing for. See Bowling alone, 337,
116. Still Putnam associates his inquiry into American civic engagement most strongly with Tocqueville.
19

Putnam, Bowling Alone.

20

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 513.

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relationships would start out meaningless and then acquire meaning. It is that they would
come to mean something different, and that those meanings mattered; mere contacts or
physical co-presence was not enough. Relationships would come to be properly
understood as responsibilities that produce benefits for others and ultimately for oneself.
Tocqueville discussed the meaning of civic ties in the context of a contrast between
aristocratic societies hierarchical chain of belonging and the individualism of democratic
societies that breaks the chain.21 Read in this context, Tocqueville was saying civic
groups might generate a new kind of interdependence, build chains of newly styled
relationships that are meaningful in a democratic, individualistic society. In commercedriven America, each citizen isolate[s] himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw[s]
into the circle of family and friends... he gladly leaves the greater society to look after
itself.22 But civic relationships would pull people out of small insular circles and cultivate
in them a greater sense of collective responsibility. They would offer a thousand continual
reminders to every citizen that he lives in society.23 Americans would experience an
ongoing tug-of-war between civic cultivation and the seductions of egalitarian striving, not
an ennobling moral makeover. Still it is fair to say Tocqueville imagined that civic groups
would expand peoples understandings of the meaning of relationships themselves.
A second feature of Tocquevilles imagination for civic life, implicit in the first, is the
importance of instituted action. Ideally, Americans would engage routinely in civic
relationships over time, not merely sporadically. That is how self-interest slowly would
evolve into self-interest properly understood. Only as an everyday institution would civic
action cultivate its virtuous influence, by becoming a habit of the heart, as one of
Tocquevilles most well-known formulations puts it.24
The third feature is that civic relationships at least potentially would cultivate what I will
call social capacity. By social capacity I mean peoples ability to work together organizing
public relationships rather than ceding those relationships entirely to market exchange or
administrative fiats of the state.25 It mattered to Tocqueville that Americans might develop a
stronger sense of collective responsibility and stronger habits of working together, because
not only could they beat back the short-sighted temptations of private material striving but
also do together what central authorities might do for them otherwise. In this way
Tocqueville viewed civic process as an institution in an older sociological sense of the

21

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 508.

22

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 506.

23

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 512.

24

This is thanks in large part to the Tocqueville-inspired study by Bellah et al., Habits of the heart.

I use social capacity in the spirit of social capital critics Smith and Kulynychs usage in It may be social,
but why is it capital?, though I derive it from Tocquevilles own arguments rather than from writings on
social capital. My notion of social capacity also is informed by the social control tradition in twentiethcentury US sociology; see Robert Sampson, What community supplies, 241292, in R. Fegruson and W.
Dickens Eds., Urban problems and community development (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999).
As Morris Janowitz pointed out, earlier US sociologists used the perhaps unfortunate term social control to
mean voluntary, problem-solving communication between groups dedicated to collective ends. Social control
denotes societys capacity to control and organize itself, in contrast with both coercive control and the idea
that individual interests could accumulate into a collective order without planning at all the invisible hand
notion of classical economics. See Morris Janowitz, Sociological theory and social control, American
Journal of Sociology 81 (1975): 82108, see especially 8687, 93. Groups that cultivate social capacity can
control their relations with other groups and institutionalize those relations through intentional
communication.

25

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term,26 a component of societal organization: Civic activity ideally contributed to a balance

of institutional powers. If the balance tipped and centralized administration expanded, the
more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to
come to their help.27 Civic groups would not necessarily work against or in place of the
power of a central government, as some neoconservatives read Tocqueville today.28 But
habitual relationships association and not individual acts in the aggregate would
produce an institutional counterbalance to central authority. Social capacity would be
shared, co-produced in association and in ongoing relation to the market and state forces in
citizens lives. The notion of social capacity bids us understand the power of civic ties in
relation to other institutional realms rather than imagining those ties in isolation. This
relational, institutional dimension of civic life eludes the social capital concept.
The spirit of Tocqueville in social capital
Taking its lead from Tocquevilles oft-cited, hopeful comments, Putnams influential and
fascinating study of Italian civic life, Making Democracy Work, stated that civil associations
cultivate in their members habits of cooperation, solidarity, and public-spiritedness.
Members of a civic community participate actively in public affairs, not solely to pursue
private ends but to advance the public good. They trust and respect one another even when
they disagree.29 The subsequent study of American civic engagement, Bowling Alone,
reiterated these themes nearly verbatim, noting Tocquevilles laudatory comments on the
joining habits of Americans and affirming Tocquevilles statements on the horizonbroadening qualities of civic interaction.30 As a preview article put it, civic engagement
encourages citizens to broaden their self-understandings, developing the I into the
we.31
It is not just the phraseology but the three big conceptual features of Tocquevilles civic
imagination that echo in these contemporary studies of civic life: meaningful relationships,
instituted action, and social capacity. Social capital works to the good of the larger
community because within relationships that constitute social capital, people come to widen
their awareness of the many ways in which our fates are linked, and they develop a
broader conception of politics and democracy than merely the advocacy of narrow
interests.32 The relationships that constitute social capital sustain a regular connection

26

For an influential map of the distinctions between old and new institutionalisms in sociology, see Paul
DiMaggio and Walter Powell, Introduction, 138, in Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Eds.), The new
institutionalism in organizational analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); for other accounts,
see W. Richard Scott, Institutions and organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); Arthur
Stinchcombe, On the virtues of the old institutionalism, Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 118.

27

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 515.

28

For Tocquevilles view that civil associations might operate in concert with governmental authorities to
provide for social welfare, see Chad Goldberg, Social citizenship and a reconstructed Tocqueville,
American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 289315. For a more common, neoconservative reading of
Tocquevilles view on civic groups and the state, see Peter Berger and Richard J. Neuhaus, To empower
people: From state to civil society (Washington, D.C.: AEI, 1977).
29

Putnam, Making democracy work, 8891.

30

Putnam, Bowling alone, 48, 65, 337338.

31

Robert Putnam, Bowling alone: Americas declining social capital, Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 6578.
Putnam, Bowling alone, 288, 343.

32

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among individuals at the grassroots.33 Just as in Tocquevilles scenario, then, broadened

meanings and habitual civic relating would work together. Regular connections in a group,
in Putnams view, cultivate new understandings of relationships beyond as well as inside the
group. And following Tocqueville, Putnam is interested in civic groups ability to cultivate
social capacity. Social capital by definition is composed of relationships in which people are
doing with others, rather than doing for others. Putnam argued that collaboration among
citizens, doing with, strengthens citizens ability to monitor governments performance.34
Conversely, a politics without social capital35 would suffer from a lack of social capacity.
There is little other way to understand the comment that a politics without face-to-face socializing and organizing might take the form of a Perot-style electronic town hall.... Many
opinions would be heard, but only as a muddle...neither engaging with one another nor offering
much guidance to decision makers. From this viewpoint, the explosion of staff-led, professionalized, Washington-based advocacy organizations is less desirable than a politics that depends on citizens participating and working collaboratively to influence either local or national
affairs.36 In the larger institutional context, civic community would counterbalance and perhaps
enhance the goods that governmental agencies or non-profit professional experts offer citizens.
To study the meaningful relationships, instituted action and social capacity that create what
Putnam called civic community, the Italy and US studies both constructed indexes of social
capital. In the study of Italian civic life, these included figures on voting behavior, newspaper
readership, and the density of cultural and sports clubs throughout Italys regions, as well as
figures on associational memberships, voting behavior, party strength, and associational longevity between 1860 and 1920.37 The Bowling Alone study also translated a Tocquevillian
imagination into an index of social capital, this time based mostly on quantities of groups, civic
behavior or individual orientations. The index tapped social capitals conceptual troika, including
measures of organizational density and rates of membership (networks), frequency of individual
civic behaviors (norms), and survey data on how respondents perceive other people (trust).38
To retain its Tocquevillian moorings, an index of social capital would have to count groups
or behaviors that plausibly could meet Tocquevillian expectations. The indices of social capital
excluded mass-membership interest groups such as the American Association of Retired Persons or professional non-profit groups that develop global food policy or advocate civil rights in
developing countries, because in Putnams view, these tertiary groups do not create routine,
cooperative relationships. A member pays dues, receives a quarterly update, and perhaps signs
an e-mail petition. A member may do good deeds for unseen beneficiaries, at least indirectly,
but does not work together with other group members over time. Doing good for other
people, however laudable, is not part of the definition of social capital39; doing for would
not cultivate social capacity. Virtual civic interaction does not count in the inventory either,
for the same reason. Perot-style electronic town hall meetings, in Putnams view, are sorry
substitutes for real civic community.
If barring tertiary organizations and highly exclusive groups was sufficient to produce a
good index of social capital, then we could take counts of group memberships and other civic
33

Ibid., 51, 116117.

34

Putnam, Making democracy work.

35

Putnam, Bowling alone, 341.

36

Ibid., 343344.

37

Putnam, Making democracy work, 96, 149.

38

Putnam, Bowling alone, 291.

39

Ibid., 117.

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behavior as reasonable proxies for Tocquevillian relationships, routines, and capacities. Complications immediately arise, though: Some groups are more outward-reaching than others,
more broadly civic-minded than others. Bowling Alone mentions urban gangs, local
NIMBY movements, and the Ku Klux Klan as extreme examples of groups whose members may do with one another but do not intend to broaden their sense of interdependence
with a wider circle of others. That is why the framework introduced a distinction between the
bonding social capital that strengthens cohesion within a group and bridging social capital
that helps a group connect to other individuals and groups across social differences, and
proposed that civic groups may produce both kinds in varying proportions.40 But do bonding
and bridging metaphors adequately distinguish different kinds of civic relationships?
Implicitly, Bowling Alone recognized this could be a problem, since clear measures of
bonding and bridging capital do not exist.41
Ethnographic scenes below confirm these reservations. Even if we correctly characterize
some groups as extremely exclusive, and even if we add the bonding/bridging distinction,
counts of groups and behaviors still can undercut the Tocquevillian intentions embedded in
social capitals conceptualization from the start. We need a more conceptually consistent
way to find out when if at all Toquevillian thinking about civic groups is right, instead of
trying to define an appropriate population of groups a priori and proceeding with the count.

An alternative to social capital

Group styles: Informal institutions of group life
Because the social capital concept has such a hard time distinguishing between types of
social relationships, civic engagement scholar Robert Fishman proposes that neoinstitutionalist thinking offers better tools for studying social ties.42 I take his proposal as
a good starting point for articulating Tocquevilles insights with sociological discipline:
Neo-institutionalism highlights routine relationships made meaningful by cultural scripts,
and it gives us a vocabulary to distinguish different kinds of doing with, so that we get a
conceptual handle on social capacity, too.43 I saw in the field that important aspects of civic
See, for instance, Putnam, Bowling alone; Robert Putnam and Kristin Goss, Introduction, 320, in
Democracies in flux; see also Ross Gittell and Avis Vidal, Community organizing: Building social capital as a
development strategy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). Proponents of the framework are distinguishing more
types of social capital beyond the bonding and bridging variants: There is formal and informal social capital,
thick and thin social capital, inward-looking and outward looking social capital. See Putnam and Goss,
Introduction. Some social capital researchers realize bridging itself is very vague, and have suggested four
different types of bridging social capital that unify people in successively broad circles of togetherness, from
neighborhood to nation; on this point, see Mark R. Warren, J. Phillip Thompson, and Susan Saegert, The role of
social capital in combating poverty, 128, in Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren (Eds.), Social
capital and poor communities (New York: Russell Sage, 2001).

40

41
42

Putnam, Bowling alone, 23.

Robert Fishman, Democracys voices.

For general statements of the approach, see Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in
organizational analysis; W. Richard Scott, John W. Meyer, and John Boli, Institutional environments and
organizations: structural complexity and individualism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994). For reviews
and examples of varying neoinstitutionalisms in sociology and political science, see Elizabeth Clemens and
James Cook, Politics and institutionalism: Explaining durability and change, Annual Review of Sociology
25 (1999): 441466; Mary Brinton and Victor Nee (Eds.), The new institutionalism in sociology (New York:
Russell Sage, 1998).
43

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539

life unfold along the lines that neo-institutionalists highlight: Civic groups follow taken for
granted understandings that organize patterns of action over time and that usually depend
on informal social sanctions rather than authoritative intervention.44
Building on these insights, Eliasoph and Lichtermans concept of group style45 pinpoints
features of relationships that should matter to civic engagement scholars but disappear
inside of social capital. Group style is a recurrent pattern of interaction that arises from a
groups taken-for-granted understandings about how to be a good member in a group
setting. Group style is how people coordinate themselves as a group; there are different
ways to be together as a group, and thus different group styles. Just as neo-institutionalists
argue that the same organizational forms may recur in many organizations,46 group style
need not be unique to one setting or group but potentially recurs in many settings across
groups; group styles belong to broader cultural repertoires. At the same time, one
organization may host more than one style in different settings of the organization.
The concept of group style also grasps qualities of interaction and group variation that neoinstitutionalist concepts tend to overlook. Neo-institutionalist approaches have focused on
formal organizational myths or implicit schema or cultural models that shape action
across whole organizations or fields.47 The group style concept in contrast focuses attention
on informal, institution-like patterns carried in interaction, in specific settings. Neoinstitutionalists hold that organizations adopt other organizations ways of doing things to
boost their own legitimacy or survive in a competitive environment.48 An empirical question,
this may be true in some cases, and this logic may explain why the style of plug-in
volunteering pictured below so closely complements the needs of social service bureaucracies
for non-paid, short-term help.49 Yet group styles endure even when they narrow groups
legitimacy and threaten their survival. Group styles are meaningful to members even when
they are inefficient or derided by surrounding groups.50 They are customary patterns of
interaction that constitute group form, rather than models used consciously to form groups.
Three dimensions of style coordinate a group in a setting. These dimensions work
together; distinguishing them is a heuristic device for pinning down more securely how one
setting may differ from another.51 Here it is enough to focus on a groups style of

44
For the source of this definition, see Ronald Jepperson, Institutions, institutional effects, and
institutionalism in Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism inorganizational analysis; Clemens
and Cook, Politics and institutionalism.

Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, Culture in interaction, American Journal of Sociology 108 (2003):
735794.

45

46

Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, Introduction, 14.

47

See Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in organizational analysis; Elisabeth Clemens, The
peoples lobby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Penny Edgell Becker, Congregations in
conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging gay identities
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective
rationality in organization fields, 6382, in Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in
organizational analysis.

48

49

For longer discussions of this viewpoint, see Wuthnow, Loose connections; Lichterman, Elusive
togetherness.
50
See Lichterman, Elusive togetherness, for examples of styles maintained despite their ineffectiveness. For
more discussion of conceptual slippage and inconsistencies in neoinstitutionalist writings, see C. Brady Potts,
Culture in organizations: Mediating rules and practice in everyday life, paper presented at the annual
meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association, North Hollywood, CA, 2006.
51

Eliasoph and Lichterman, Culture in interaction, 740.

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maintaining group bonds and its style of drawing group boundaries. Groups have
customary ways of bonding defining members implicit obligations to one another. And
groups have customary ways of drawing boundaries on a larger social map of groups and
institutions that are like them, not like them, or irrelevant to them. Breaches and sudden
interruptions of the routine help observers discern the style that has been in play, as scenes
below show.52
The volunteer style
In the most common, contemporary American understanding, volunteering means
something more specific than simply voluntary action of any sort: Volunteers want to
get things done with a can-do spirit, and they do so frequently under the direction of a
professional who defines the tasks for them.53 I will call this common form of volunteer
activity plug-in style volunteering. Plug-in style volunteering is not only an exchange of
free labor or person-hours54 or a natural expression of compassion,55 but a meaningful set
of group boundaries and bonds that volunteers in many organizations enact routinely. Some
close-up studies investigate and criticize volunteering as activity that refuses the world of
politics;56 my purpose is different. Rather than define volunteering in relation to what
sociologists or their subjects call political, I ask if plug-in style volunteering cultivates the
Tocquevillian features that the social capital concept wants to project.
The following scenes compare group styles and their consequences in two volunteer
projects with shifting casts of participants and one group with an ongoing core of members.
Each was loosely affiliated with Lakeburgs Urban Religious Coalition (URC), which drew
members and financial support from roughly fifty churches in metropolitan Lakeburg. The
churches were mostly mainline Protestant, with a contingent of evangelical Protestant
churches, several Catholic congregations, two Unitarian fellowships, a Friends meeting
house, and a synagogue. Comparing volunteer efforts supports my contention that the group
style concept illuminates meanings, routines, and social capacity better than social capital
can. I investigate the Tocquevillian claim about meaningful relationships by showing how
the volunteers draw boundaries, and I investigate the claim about social capacity by
discovering how they sustain group bonds.

52

Group styles may be identified with help of sensitizing questions and by playing close attention to
interactions that make style suddenly explicit; these include interactional mistakes, awkwardness, and
unexpected changes in the interactional routine. See Eliasoph and Lichterman, Culture in interaction, 746,
784787.

53

Wuthnow, Loose connections; Paul Schervish, Virginia Hodgkinson, Margaret Gates, and Associates,
Care and community in modern society (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995); Eliasoph, Avoiding politics;
Susan Ostrander, Women of the upper class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).

See John Wilson and Marc Musick, Toward an integrated theory of volunteering, American Sociological
Review 62 (1997): 694713.

54

55

The meaning of compassionate action itself has changed greatly in western societies; see Wuthnow, Acts of
compassion. Subcultures within the United States continue to imbue community service relationships with
different, more collectivist meanings than the customary ones I just described. See for instance Susan
Eckstein, Community as gift-giving: Collectivistic roots of volunteerism, American Sociological Review 66
(2001): 829851; Barbara Myerhoff, Number our days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).

56
See for instance Wuthnow, Acts of compassion; Eliasoph, Avoiding politics; Janet Poppendieck, Sweet
charity? Emergency food and the end of entitlement (New York: Penguin, 1998).

Theor Soc (2006) 35:529563

541

Case 1: Plug-in style volunteering

Bowling Alone counted plug-in volunteering among the indicators of social capital, so why
should we not? After all, volunteers may come in contact with people they would not
otherwise meet other volunteers, the people volunteers serve, or service professionals. It
is not only mayors and local television newscasters who credit volunteering with
community-building potential. Some social capital research implies that casual volunteering
has the potential to thrust volunteers beyond their usual social rounds, bringing different
kinds of people together and building ongoing relations of reciprocity and mutual
concern.57 The following ethnographic scenes from two volunteer programs would
challenge that claim. Both programs served kids. One was quite controlling, while the
other worked much more loosely, but similarities between them suggest that a variety of
volunteer programs may have roughly similar styles and potentials.
Fun Evenings
Inspired by a youth program launched in a big city not far away, Fun Evenings was a
volunteer effort that organized drug-free, weapons-free evenings of dancing, snacking,
basketball, and ping-pong for at-risk teenagers. Lakeburg resident and churchgoer Polly, a
white woman of about 60 from an upper-middle class neighborhood, took the initiative to
organize Lakeburgs first Fun Evening in the fall of 1996. The Urban Religious Coalition
(URC) agreed to make Fun Evenings one of the programs it would sponsor as part of its
new Humane Response Alliance, a collection of volunteer efforts and church partnerships
with county social workers that the URC initiated as a humane response to state and
national welfare reform legislation. Polly argued and URC leaders agreed that a cycle of
youth violence and drug abuse could be headed Lakeburgs way, especially as more and
more families had the social safety net pulled out from under them. That fall, Polly won a
grant from United Way to fund her work. For the next 2 years, she organized Fun Evenings
every 2 to 4 months, under URCs aegis, in high school auditoriums and community
centers around town, drawing on the help of youth counselors from a county agency, and
several dozen, mostly white and middle-class churchgoers, in their 50s and older, who had
signed up to be in her pool of potential volunteers. After its first 2 years, Fun Evenings
became a project of the Lakeburg County Youth Services agency, continuing with much of
the same activities and the same style of volunteering.
In Fun Evenings, volunteers got practice creating brief, impersonal relationships with
other volunteers as well as the kids who participated. Plug-in style volunteering was
meaningful and customary a culture of group life: Volunteers comments and reactions to
situations showed that they were expecting to volunteer plug-in style and could put the
value of that kind of volunteering in their own words. At the same time, plug-in
volunteering did not necessarily cultivate any broader, more collectively responsible
meanings of how I am part of we the way social capitals Tocquevillian aspirations
might imply. And rather than boosting volunteers capacity to work interdependently,
volunteering made us dependent on an organizer and a social service staff who set the
parameters of the program, defined the youthful service population for the volunteers, and
made themselves available to police the served if necessary; that was customary too.
For instance, Putnam, Bowling alone; Greeley, Coleman revisited; Becker and Dhingra, Religious
inolvement and volunteering; Robert Wuthnow, Saving America? Faith-based services and the future of
civil society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Loose connections.

57

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Customs of volunteering, in summary, produced a modular, limited style of civic

engagement, one that arguably is widespread in the United States but does not meet the
neo-Tocquevillian definition of social capital.
The meaning of relationships at Fun Evenings: A look at group boundaries
Volunteer organizers and social service professionals defined the meaning of relationships
among volunteers, kids and the outside world: They defined the group boundaries of Fun
Evenings, and as I show, volunteers mostly shared the definitions. The most salient groups
on the social map here were monitorial adults, at-risk teens and pre-teens, and youth
service coordinators, all hemmed into a small space by dangers outside, the faceless social
problems of drugs and violence emphasized in Pollys presentations and brochures.
Volunteers learned a particular way of relating to the kids wary watchfulness. While the
program was specific about the social problems it intended to alleviate, the kids themselves
constituted a vague presence on the map. Pollys presentations never explained to
volunteers exactly who were the teens and pre-teens likely to go to Fun Evenings, how they
would find out about these events, or how they would get to them. Presentations frequently
started with the statement that a big city not far away used to have a low murder rate, and
that everyone knew this was not the case now. We dont want to go the way of (Big City),
Polly would say. We dont want our kids to enter the cycle of violence. Polly never
intimated that the teens themselves were bad kids. She implied, rather, that they were kids
we should worry about. We could guess they were kids from low-income and mostly
minority neighborhoods euphemistically called challenged neighborhoods in local news
reports. Asked once at a URC board meeting if youth crime and murder rates were not
declining nationally a challenge to the purveyed social map Polly replied that they still
were high. I did not learn anything more about the kids from presentations, brochures, or
other volunteers.
Volunteering over a 2-year period for Fun Evenings, I tried to be warily watchful, like
the other volunteers. We learned that the most important boundary defining the kids at any
single Fun Evening was the one they would cross if they stepped outside the safe space into
a world of threats and enticements. Polly reminded us at each of the four Fun Evenings I
attended, in the same language: The kids arent supposed to leave the building, and if they
do they cant come back in. Comings and goings invited the risk that the teens would bring
drugs or weapons into the safe space. At the very first Fun Evening, Polly told us that if
anyone comes in with booze on their breath, kick em right out, bouncing her thumb
toward the door. At my third Fun Evening, just as at previous ones I had attended as a
volunteer, Polly made a point of showing me around the building, even though I had
volunteered there before, explaining where the kids could go, where they could not go. The
following and all other indented passages are excerpts from field notes unless otherwise
identified.
Polly: They dont go up there.
PL: They dont go up there...?
Polly (agitated): What? No. They dont go in there. And we dont want them over there.
She continues explaining the donts. She tells me that the kids should not go out the
glass doors in back of the cafeteria. Polly thanks us at the end of the evening and asks if she
can call us again. I nod and say Sure. Suddenly she scoots over to a threesome of black
teens who had walked in and were peering through the small door window into the

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543

cafeteria. Polly: You cant go in that way. Its closed now. They say nothing. She repeats,
Were closed. They turn now toward the admission tables and she tries to insinuate
herself gingerly in front of their path, gives up quickly and glances toward us with an
expression I interpret as see, thats what theyll do. A wiry, white youth counselor with a
buzz-cut stands at the admission table directly in front of one of the visitors, swaying his
body to block him as he squeezes leftward and rightward to get past. The visitor soon gives
up; a young black youth counselor exchanges a few calm words with him that I cant hear,
and the threesome walk back out.
It became clear that we accepted Pollys map of volunteer relationships, because even
though we knew little about the kids, we were trying to be good monitors and we worried
about whether we were doing it well or not: When several boys said they needed to go
outside to get stuff for the first Fun Evenings talent show, volunteer Mike paused a
moment. He wondered what I thought about it given the rules, and then said slowly, Oh,
ok, let them out. A foursome of girls needed to go outside to direct their friend to the
correct building. Mike and I hesitated for much longer this time. I asked if they could just
signal to their friends from the window. Finally we let the girls out, hesitantly, warily. I had
wondered to myself, what if they were up to something dangerous, what if they wanted to
bring drugs or a knife into the recreation center? I felt responsible. I felt better knowing that
there were muscular youth counselors around who could play bad cop if necessary and
enforce the relationship that I wanted to abide by even though I was not succeeding.
Volunteers expressed no animus against the kids and some clearly got a kick out of
watching them dance to hip-hop. Mostly, we watched, letting them engage in approved
forms of fun on their own within the safe space. At meetings of URC-sponsored community
service or advocacy groups, I had heard some of the volunteers talk about how they wanted
to reach out to people different from them, develop a sense of responsible co-ownership of
their community. One was Clarisse, who whispered to me cryptically at my second Fun
Evening that she had tried to get some church volunteers involved in voter registration at a
local festival sponsored by the NAACP, because she thought lilly-white church volunteers should have direct contact with people of color. She criticized those church
volunteers for not working well with African-American NAACP members; she thought the
volunteers scared prospective black members away from the NAACPs membership drive
table. Volunteers at Fun Evenings were almost entirely white and the majority of the teens
appeared mostly African-American, Latino, or southeast Asian, but I did not see Clarisse
conversing with the kids at all. At meetings of the URCs social justice task force, she told
us about the voter registration work that she did regularly with low-income people and
encouraged other members to do it too. She told me privately that the task force spent too
much time working out its ideological positions on welfare policy: it was too concerned
with being politically correct; she would rather work with people. Yet Clarisse was not
just a self-serving hypocrite. By my third Fun Evening, I was getting it that relationshipbuilding between volunteers and kids was not a customary part of volunteering. It did not
have a clear place on the given map of meaningful relationships, even if in other contexts
some of the volunteers such as Clarisse talked about and created relationships differently.
The conversations I heard between other volunteers and kids were limited mostly to quick
repartees that accompany ping-pong playing or else directions to the kids from volunteers.
Volunteers sustained politely distanced relationships with one another too. At Fun
Evenings, being a good volunteer meant relating to other volunteers in a cordially light and
detachable way, at least partly in the interest of keeping restless teens busy and the doors
secure. But couldnt those meanings change? Might volunteers quick exchanges with other
volunteers slowly contribute to new, thicker civic relationships? In the logic of Putnams

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social capital argument, that is what is supposed to happen: Repeated participation in civic
associations with overlapping memberships builds new civic ties, as individuals see one
another in different settings and get to know one another over time, finding they can depend
on one another for future projects.
While this scenario possibly might unfold under some conditions, there are good reasons
to think that the routine style of a Fun Evening lessened the possibility. I was on a list with
other people in Pollys pool of prospective volunteers. Dozens of others had signed up, at
community service events at which Polly had introduced her program. Signing up meant
being willing to receive phone requests to volunteer at Fun Evenings; it did not signify a
promise to volunteer. Polly phoned us when she needed volunteers. She thanked me
profusely for coming, each time, so she must have approached her volunteer pool with the
hope much more than the expectation that people would stay active over time. I saw several
but certainly not all of the same volunteers at each Fun Evening. I learned what some other
volunteers did for a living and where they lived, by asking them directly, in between
watching the kids from different vantage points in the cafeteria, dance room, or hallway,
and carrying out requests to relieve other volunteers of their watching duties. I noticed that
others did not ask me who I was or where I lived and they did not talk at length with other
volunteers. At different Fun Evenings they were starting up ping-pong games, directing
kids to the talent show or the dance hosted by a disc jockey, or announcing that the pizzas
were ready if kids seemed to be getting restless. They were being good volunteers, working
to keep kids busy and safe, carrying off wary watchfulness and cordial distance. Neither the
structure of volunteer recruitment nor the meanings that shaped volunteering opened much
space for sociability. Volunteers plugged in and out of volunteer shifts, and Polly was in
charge of the big board. From hearing Clarisse talk at the social justice task force, I knew
that she could be counted on to care about race relations, enough to have become one of the
few white members of the NAACP, and that she tried putting her talk into action. Had we
known each other only through one or even repeated Fun Evenings, it would have been
very hard to guess these things and it was unlikely I would have learned them while
watching warily and sustaining cordial distance.

Social capacity at Fun Evenings: A look at group bonds

The group bonds sustained at Fun Evenings made it difficult to develop the Tocquevillian
social capacity projected by the social capital concept. First, a good member was someone
who could keep busy solo, not someone who depended on collaborating with other
volunteers to produce fun for the kids or work as equals with director Polly. My own
experiences cued me in. For instance, it never occurred to me that anything I said or did
would create a reputation that might influence volunteers willingness to regard me as a
good collaborator, someone who does with. Only Polly would know if I seemed like a
good volunteer or not. Comparisons with other programs in the larger study bolstered my
interpretation. I noticed that I came home without the participant-observers worries I felt
after a night of field work with other community service groups I was studying. After
meetings of the inter-church social safety net coalition, or the church-based education and
advocacy group that opposed welfare reform, or the executive board that oversaw these
groups, I worried not infrequently that I may have offended someone inadvertently, talked
too much or too little. These were meetings at which I was doing with others at the
meeting, over time. At Fun Evenings, in contrast, my worries about having looked like a
dowdy representative of adult order evaporated as soon as I had left the scene.

Theor Soc (2006) 35:529563

545

Other volunteers shared my sense of the group bonds in play. Volunteers were depending
on one another to work largely independently rather than interdependently. At my first Fun
Evening, I discovered that other volunteers had wondered on their own what I was
wondering: What exactly were we supposed to do beyond being watchful? Since directions
issued from Polly, I had assumed I must have missed out on some of them, having heard
only the directives regarding security. I asked Clarisse if she knew what to do as a
volunteer. She mused that she never really knows what to do at these things. She said it
lightly; it did not bother her. It seemed customary. Other volunteers told me they did not
really know exactly what to do either, beyond keeping kids in and drugs and weapons out,
and their tone suggested that they were not worrying about it either. Doing did not have
to mean doing-with. They wandered around, watching, looking interested in whatever the
kids were doing. The same happened at my second, third, and fourth Fun Evening. During
my second Fun Evening, in a high school cafeteria, I struck up conversation with Sherry, a
woman that Polly recruited for this evening from her own Episcopal church. I noticed
Sherry was circling the cafeteria floor, looking busy and smiling like someone freshly
amused by the things kids do these days. A few kids were swaying to the rap over the
loudspeaker, others were revving up their bodies to the beat but failing to ignite in dance. I
sauntered out into the hallway, and Sherry buzzed by us.
Participant-observer: Do you know what youre doing?
Sherry: No, providing an adult (pause) presence, I guess. Its fun to watch,
though.
As volunteers, we were doing alongside, not doing together collaboratively. Encountering
Polly while wandering through a high school hallway at the second Fun Evening, I asked if
there was something else I should do; I was worried about it. Just walk around and look
like adults, she said.
Volunteering at Fun Evenings presupposed that regular connections between volunteers
were irrelevant to the evenings work of the volunteer, whether or not volunteers happened
to know each other from their churches or URC community service groups or somewhere
else, whether or not they had volunteered before. We all got the same short and sketchy
introduction to a Fun Evening and its zero tolerance policy whether we had volunteered for
other evenings or not. We got the same introduction to the rules of Fun Evenings, the
prohibitions and forbidden zones, each time. We created a loose, contingent group of selfsufficient volunteers for the duration of one Fun Evening.
Acting solo, maintaining the group bonds that might characterize a large house party, we
did not have to take ownership of the event. Someone else could be responsible for
organizing the evening, deciding who would set out the ping-pong tables, find the
basketballs in storage bins, decide when the dance session with the disc jockey would begin
and end, not to mention advertising the event and deciding which young people were
appropriate invitees from the programs point of view. We were not doing that work, nor
learning how; we did not ever hear exactly how kids got invited, by whom, which kids.
None of this is to say that volunteering at a Fun Evening was a meaningless or alien
activity. On the contrary, volunteers were comfortable with plug-in style volunteering most
of the time and articulated its value easily in their own words. It was work for a good cause
that did not require tedious planning on our part. At my first volunteer stint, for instance,
my door partner Mike offered without prompting that Fun Evenings was a good program
because it was about doing things, and came as a completed package. Volunteers could
put on a Fun Evening without a lot of discussing and planning from scratch, he said; he

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contrasted Fun Evenings favorably with a community service program run by the Better
Business Bureau that involved planning and assessing and made doing more complicated.
At my third stint, a long-time URC volunteer aged 78 told me she liked the doing too,
and she liked to see the children. During my stints, no one ever commented on the
opportunity to see or work with other volunteers or program directors. Fun Evenings were
fun for volunteers for other reasons.
Solo busy-ness under a director was what volunteering was supposed to be like. That
became even more clear when sudden interruptions to the loose choreography of solo busyness puzzled volunteers without prompting us to change the dance. Occasionally,
directions issued unpredictably and we, though puzzled, would follow them anyway. At my
third Fun Evening, a large man came into the gym just after the African dance troupe had
finished its performance, and told us we all needed to leave it immediately. Had there been
a breach of security? I asked another volunteer why we needed to leave the auditorium. He
did not know and sounded frankly puzzled himself. At another Fun Evening, many of the
kids did not show up for the first hour and a half; their rides to Downtown Youth Center
were running late. What were we to do? How could we help make this suddenly shorter
evening fun for the kids? We waited for the kids, tried to make ourselves busy with the few
kids already ambling about the recreation room with its rows of plaid sofas and pool tables,
but did not find out what to do and did not plan to do anything different. We responded to
the predicament in the style that was customary for Fun Evenings as solo agents playing
loosely choreographed roles, waiting for our leads. We did not take collective responsibility
for organizing the evening.
It would be a mistake to conclude that Fun Evenings volunteers really did not constitute
a group, had no group bonds, and thus is not a proper candidate for this analysis. At each
Fun Evening, Polly made a point of introducing us to at least one other volunteer and pointed
out the pizza, pop, and coffee that someone somewhere always made appear. The cue, if
anyone needed it, was obvious: It would have been rude simply to ignore other volunteers
and focus exclusively on kids. This was not bowling alone. We were creating the
relationships of a temporary, contingent group. These deserve to be understood in their own
terms; they simply were not the horizontal, long-term, responsibility-generating relationships projected in Tocquevillian thinking. They offered conveniently short-term opportunities for people who wanted to be active, doing something, in relation to kids that
everyone assumed were more likely than affluent kids to encounter drugs or violence. We
could not know whether the assumption was correct but it defined the kids for the
volunteers. Observations here suggest that relationships created at Fun Evenings, by
themselves, were unlikely to broaden horizons and cultivate social capacity over time as the
social capital concept invites us to assume. A volunteer who kept coming back for more
Fun Evenings during the 2 years that I observed the project would have learned Polly was
responsible for the program and its social map and our job was to do-alongside one another,
under Polly.
A comparison case: Summer Fun
Maybe Fun Evenings did not cultivate a deeper sense of we-ness or strengthen social
capacity among the volunteers because of an idiosyncratic emphasis on wary watchfulness.
Maybe volunteers learned to be more afraid of the kids than volunteers do in other
programs. A different program, Summer Fun, makes for a good comparison since it actively
encouraged volunteers to relate creatively to kids and never made danger or risk into a
program theme. Summer Fun was a 2-week day camp for elementary school-aged kids,

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organized by Park Cluster, and assisted and directed by the Lakeburg county family
services agency. Park Cluster, an alliance of mostly Protestant churches, collaborated with
Parks neighborhood center and the county family services agency in sponsoring small
community service and development projects for the Park neighborhood, whose six
thousand, mostly low-income residents were African Americans or Laotian, Cambodian, or
Spanish-speaking Americans of the first or second generation, with a small minority of
Euro-Americans. The Cluster depended mostly on unpaid effort, assisted by staff people
from an urban religious coalition, the URC. It recruited volunteers and organized sessions
for the camp every summer. It was looser, more self-expressive and child-centered than
safety-centered Fun Evenings. Comparing Summer Fun and Fun Evenings illustrates the
continuities of plug-in style volunteering across programs with different idiocultures.58
When I arrived for my first volunteer stint, Mosley, the new family services liaison to the
neighborhood and director of Summer Fun, had typed up a sheet with different age groups
marked in columns, with timed activities listed down the sides, at 9:30, 10:30, and 11:30 A.M.,
and names in boxes. He was waiting for the woman from Lakeburg Childrens Museum to
finish the kaleidoscope-making activity by 10:30 so that the nature walk and the fun of
walking a dog named Harriet could begin, but it was 10:40 and the kids were still inside the
apartment basement room coloring in their kaleidoscopes and making eyeglasses out of
mylar. The adult volunteers were standing around the picnic tables, waiting. Ken quietly set
out some crayons in cardboard boxtops with pieces of paper and said to no one in particular
that it was an art project for anyone who wanted to do it. Just as at Fun Evenings, then,
the group boundaries of Summer Fun marked off a director from volunteer work-slot fillers
though Mosley the director was much easier going and much less focused on the kids risks of
getting into trouble. The kids had a somewhat more distinct place on the social map; we knew
they all lived in the low-income, multi-racial Park neighborhood.
Group bonds, as in Fun Evenings, were cordial and detachable, and required that
volunteers fill their roles as autonomously as possible once given their role. While
Summer Funs group bonds made volunteering into a largely solo gig, the program
depended on and affirmed volunteers who could give kids an outlet for expression, who
could project fun and individuality rather than security and authority. During the planning
for Summer Fun at their monthly meetings, Park Cluster members had agreed that the
camp was seeking volunteers who could contribute something unusual to the camp as
individuals an unusual instrument, a craft project, a cartoon-worthy dog to play with. No
one in the overseeing Cluster and no one at Summer Fun during my participant-observation
stints ever implied that good volunteers needed to be good team-workers or collaborators,
though in theory a kids program could have depended on adults collaborating with one
another closely. Again, the volunteering was meaningful, not random or anomic, and
volunteers put the meaning of it in their own words. While standing by one of the picnic
tables, I chatted a bit with LaVerne, who told me, I like doing it [volunteering for the
camp]. I just like doing it. I think the idea is to come and share a little of yourself.... La
Verne introduced herself, just as Polly at Fun Evenings always introduced volunteers or
made sure they introduced themselves. These volunteers, just like the ones at Fun Evenings,
constituted a group, of a very loose and contingent sort, for the duration of a session. With
temporary, modular group bonds, volunteers tried to work happily as self-starters creating
fun. Anxious to be useful rather than waiting around awkwardly, I had asked the woman
leading the mylar art project if I could assist her in some way. No, she thought everything
58

For classic descriptions and analysis of group idiocultures, see Gary A. Fine, With the boys (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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was all set, she said, and smiled and said nothing more. Everyone was busy, or looking
busy. With slack time between scheduled projects, volunteers could have struck up long
conversations with one another while watching the kids, but they did not. They worked
hard to stay busy, individually, with something that could involve kids. Like Polly of Fun
Evenings, Mosley the director set a tone, though quite different from Pollys wary
watchfulness. Once he had figured out his time-grid, Mosley joined volunteers Ken and
Jack who were presiding at the crayon-drawing table; in fact it was Ken and Jack and then
Mosley drawing, hoping to entice some kids into the activity, while the kids mostly
clambered about and watched the adult volunteers draw. Mosley put lots of elbow-grease
into his blue and green house that was so thick with crayon I expected to smell the picture
from across the table. The house with its checkerboard roof drew more and more bemused
trash-talk from the kids. Mosley talked back. To a girl who did take up the drawing activity,
he laughed, Youre drawing a swimming pool on top of the flowers?! Look at those
flowers! Why are those petals like that? The girl answered with staged, television sitcom
sarcasm: Thats how I make flower petals. Do ... you ... have ... a ... problem ... with ...
that? Mosley continued saturating his cottage with crayon, held it up and announced
Anyone who wants to live in this, see me! Bantering with the kids was fine, part of the
fun at Summer Fun.
Still it was up to each of us to be resourceful in starting up some fun on our own. No
wonder volunteer Ken had called out hesitantly to no one in particular to come draw with
his box of crayons. He was trying to do his bit for the morning session by starting up some
fun. So was Maggie, who soon walked by with one very rotund basset hound and invited
kids to go on the dog-walk with her. Maggie was a success as a volunteer.
PL: How did you find out about Summer Fun?
Maggie: Well I got invited back! I did it last year.
Harriet the Basset hound had been a big hit, Maggie told me, while warning the kids not to
pour water on Harriet and asking one of the boys to come back from the oak tree behind
us.
As in Fun Evenings, volunteers could get frustrated at breaches of the expected routine.
Frustrations and responses to them cued me in to what was routine, not easily malleable or
just happenstance. Complaints about the program underscored the expectations that
volunteers tried to act on in Summer Fun. One volunteer in a big white teeshirt, by the
picnic table, was talking to another volunteer while I stood nearby. She was saying, I
asked what I could do to be helpful. They said come here at 10:30. She trailed off, then
said in disappointment that nothing in particular had happened at 10:30.
PL: So, were you helpful?
Volunteer (skeptically): I was a beanbag. Had about 4 kids sitting on me. I saw you
were a beanbag too, over there.
PL: Yeah, I had about two that could fit onto me.
The volunteer had expected that she would be told what to do, and be able to be busy doing
it on her own at the appointed time. That would have been customary.
Volunteers with experience from previous Summer Fun camps shared the womans
irritation. I asked Ken, a Park Cluster member, what he thought of this years camp. He
paused a noticeably long, awkwardly long time, said it was relaxed, and different from
other years camps in that way. Volunteer Ned agreed with him that it felt more relaxed,
he said with a pause, and said with more resolve that if they do it again, he would do it

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more the way a URC organizer had done it several years ago. Ken commented age groups
got mixed this year, and he thought that if the older kids were kept more separate, they
could get further. Ken, Ned, and the volunteer bean-bag all were depending on someone
Mosley the social worker to orchestrate the camp and follow through, while they fulfilled
their duty to play their mostly solo roles well. The camp fell short of their expectations for
acting as self-starting volunteers under clear direction and they felt frustrated or awkward as
a result.
In neither Summer Fun nor Fun Evenings did I see volunteers using their frustrations as
spring-boards to planning things together to do with the kids. Interaction in each program
ratified that volunteers were individual agents pursuing their tasks, while someone else
remained responsible for defining the relationships of the program. These were sites of civic
engagement, and volunteering in these sites counts in indices of social capital but by
social capitals neo-Tocquevillian definition it is not clear why this kind of volunteering
counts.
Plug-in style volunteering produces other goods, including the good of giving kids a fun
or safe time. But the social capital framework cannot identify the gap between the
Tocquevillian vision and the realities of plug-in style volunteering on the ground. Summer
Funs parent group, Park Cluster, did develop in a Tocquevillian direction, even if its
summer camp did not. The contrasts as well as continuities between Park Cluster and the
two volunteer projects strengthen the case for studying group style and its consequences,
rather than resting content with the social capital concept as a proxy for Tocquevillian
arguments.

Case 2: Clashing styles and the silence of social capital

Volunteering in Park Cluster
Park Cluster, unlike the Summer Fun and Fun Evenings projects, sustained regular
connections between members over time as the social capital concept projects. The entirely
white, mostly professional middle-class core of roughly twelve Cluster members had
monthly meetings, subcommittee meetings, and attended several neighborhood events
every year. Unlike Summer Fun or Fun Evenings, Park Cluster over time instituted deeper
meanings for civic relationships and much stronger social capacity. At the end of my time
observing that process, it could make sense to say that Park Cluster had developed new
bridging social capital. Social capital theorists reasonably might propose that, rather than
trying to discern group style, we simply need better distinctions between ongoing groups
and loose gatherings of shifting participants. In that case, Putnams regular connections
still would be an adequate criterion for counting social capital and a fair indicator of the
Tocquevillian civic imagination. Count more carefully could be the retort to this articles
critique. The case of Park Cluster illustrates why regular connections, at best, makes an
extremely imprecise indicator of what social capital wants to mean.
During the first 9 months of my research, Park Cluster members often enacted the same
group style as Summer Fun and Fun Evenings, with largely the same consequences even
though the Cluster was a regularly meeting group of core members, not a congeries of
shifting participants. The Cluster put the county family services agency, Family Friends,
and its sponsor, the URC, in the center of its own social map and adopted the county
agencys definitions of needs in the neighborhood, unreflectively. It positioned itself as a
helpful adjunct. I heard members sustaining group bonds that, like those in Summer Fun

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and Fun Evenings, depended on self-starting, charitable volunteers. The Cluster scaled up
its civic projects and started working with, sometimes challenging, institutional actors after
it shifted toward a different style that was alive but less evident in the group towards the
start. The shift quickened and emerged loudly at a crisis meeting described below. Only
after that point did networks, norms of reciprocity, and trust the three terms of social
capitalchange noticeably over a period of regular connections.
An exemplar of plug-in style volunteering in Park Cluster was Ned, whom we met
already at Summer Fun. When he discussed the Cluster with me, he liked referring to it as
this group were tangled up in, but that did not stop him from working tirelessly and
autonomously: I did not run into any Cluster member more often than Ned when I made
fieldworkers visits to Park. The food pantry needed new shelves; the Southeast Asian
festival needed people to serve dinner and clean up; a woman down the block with diabetes
needed someone to run errands for her. Ned met these needs. Ned articulated the groups
bonds well when he said spontaneously amidst one meetings conversation that each of us
ought to be able to go back to our churches and collect quickly one hundred diapers, or a
bunch of winter coats, if that is what the neighborhood social worker said she needed for
her clients. We ought to be able to do it; he was implying group bonds depended on
individual members resourcefulness in the interests of charity. Cluster members enacted
those bonds when they rounded up volunteers to staff activities and make sandwiches just
in time for Summer Funs first day, or when they worked to come through with big enough
financial commitments from their individual churches to pay another several months salary
to the public health nurse that the Cluster co-sponsored. As treasurer, Ned made a point of
telling the group, more than once, that there was a man in Lakeburg who always made an
annual contribution of $45 to the Cluster. It was not the Clusters biggest donation, but he
was proud of that man, honoring him for his individual, charitable initiative. The man did
his bit to help out. Ned called it all helping out, and he helped a great deal.
At the start, the Clusters social capacity was shaped mostly by this helping out
definition of civic relationships. Members served meals at neighborhood celebrations
initiated by Family Friends social workers, tutored kids in an after-school program at the
neighborhood center, or got their churches to donate wrapped presents for Park kids,
distributed at an annual neighborhood Christmas party organized by Family Friends and the
county Probation and Parole department. They helped out in the way that Fun Evenings
volunteers were helping out Polly. Group members depended on the liaison person from the
URC to write up the Cluster meeting agenda every month. The Park neighborhood social
worker together with the paid URC liaison to the group supplied well over half of the
agendas items in the first 9 months of Cluster meetings I attended. As the social worker
told me in an interview, I gave them things to do.
A Tocquevillian outcome
One group but two sets of customs. Sometimes the Clusters social horizons would broaden,
members would expect more from their sponsoring churches, and they would ponder or
complain rather than report and decide. Sometimes Cluster members sounded as if they
thought their churches should be something in addition to resource banks and aggregates of
volunteer time. At one meeting, for instance, Dora sounded frustrated at her own
congregations engagement with the Cluster even though hers was one of the core
congregations. Im still here, still motivated by that original vision [of building the
community], even if my church (pause), well, they give presents at Christmas, but. At

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another meeting, members quipped bitterly about their own relations with their
congregations:
Steven, warily: Maybe we want to bounce these (proposals) off our faith
communities.
Martha (sardonically): Some of us dont bounce with our faith-based communities!
Betty: We bounce but we dont meld!
They never complained that their churches did not offer up enough volunteers. It was more
that they felt their churches were not part of a collective effort, but acted as aggregates of
individual effort instead. They wanted the support of stronger bonds.
Sometimes members imagined the Cluster on a social map that included much more than
the Family Friends social worker or the URC liaison, surrounded by aggregates of
individual volunteer effort. At one meeting, for instance, Kendra the Family Friends social
worker had forgotten to bring a list of local elementary schools for the Cluster to use in
planning neighborhood-based academic support programs. But Cluster member Mary knew
which churches and synagogues were close to which elementary schools and thus
convenient for congregation-sponsored tutoring programs. She led a lively discussion on
the topic and continued it with me in her car afterwards. Conversations about the public
health nurse also elicited a larger and more detailed map, even at my first meeting. Having
just finished a 15-minute discussion on the need for more jam to go with the peanut butter
that the Cluster-run food pantry was giving out to hungry people, members abruptly shifted
to a discussion that brought many other actors onto the map, picturing them in specific
detail rather than casting them as needy in general. Who was going to co-sponsor the nurse?
What did Lutheran Home have to say this month? Would the nurse be culturally sensitive to
the Hmong and Hispanic as well as African-American neighborhood constituencies? Would
there be more government grant money for the nurse if she promised to do alcohol and drug
abuse intake work with her clients? The answers were never definitive. That seemed not to
matter a lot, at least for a number of months, while members assumed the URC liaison
would figure it all out.
Yet the liaison did not figure it out. In my first few months of participant-observation,
the URC liaison would try to explain how much of the nurses salary the churches would
pay, when, and for how long. At one meeting, the liaison said she thought the nurse could
begin work as soon as the following month. Members had kept asking the same questions
about the nurse for several more meetings, and the questions revealed that no one around
the table understood how much money their churches really needed to put up, when, and
how much they needed to pay for benefits. They asked when Genesis, the community
development corporation attached to a local Black Baptist congregation, would start
counting on the churches contributions, and asked who exactly Genesis was; one member
kept calling the corporation Exodus. Could the nurse begin work without the churches
financial contributions? After 3 months of the same questions in the same words, I gathered
that the URC liaison was a central reference point on these matters. It was customary to
assume that she would inform the Cluster and members would listen. On this map of group
boundaries, the URC liaison actually was more real than the nurse and the other community
organizations to which Cluster churches were in fact financially obligated.
Having wandered into the parish nurse project, with the nurse about to start her work in
the neighborhood, Cluster members suddenly started to sound very unsettled about the
group, 9 months into my study. At a crisis meeting, the same month that the nurse was to
start her rounds, Cluster members complained like never before, sounding like people with

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a lot of pent-up frustrations. Their criticisms of the group seemed too specific, too formed,
to have been thought up de novo that day. Putting together the previous meetings call for a
new organizational structure with the earlier instances of stretching horizons and sharpening
tongues, I gathered that members were torn between two different styles of togetherness.
What had seemed like organizational flexibility now seemed like a clash between the
volunteer style and a different group style that I call partnership.
Crisis and a shift in style. At the crisis meeting, volunteer-style group bonds came in for
intense criticism. Martha was pushing for a new finance committee. Betty agreed. Mary
liked the idea, too: Weve taken on the financial responsibility [of the parish nurse] and
need the structure to carry it out, she reasoned. For 2 years, including the period when the
Cluster planned and revisited and revisited again the nurse project, members had gotten
along with a loose group structure. They had relied on the URC liaison to take up the slack,
and take care of administrative details between meetings. For a lot of members, it now was
no longer enough to be handy, self-starting volunteers who could rely on the URC liaison or
the Family Friends professional to keep track of things. Members were saying in effect that
a good group was one that met its increasing outside obligations by symbolizing members
bonds to one another more formally and predictably. Loose, informal ties inside the group
were not enough for good members any more. This interpretation helped me understand
why the Cluster kept combining conversations about its relations to other groups and
conversations about its own structure: The previous month, Mary had asked the Cluster to
consider [our] relations to URC, to our congregations, to the neighborhood center, to JFF
and maybe something about our structure, our identity. Now, at the crisis meeting, Dora
blurted out were such a loose organization that were not sure whos doing what! A more
formal structure would not only make Cluster members feel more comfortable about their
risky responsibilities, but would signal to others on its map that it meant to be a trustworthy
partner in the neighborhood. Favoring formality is not simply common sense, not a universal
sign of a group that means business.59 In Park Cluster, members needed to depend on each
other in a new way, and symbolized the new interdependence with the formal positions of
presiding director, secretary, and treasurer.
Practically speaking, these positions did not require of their occupants many new tasks
beyond ones Cluster members had already been sharing, or doing in an ad hoc way. Ned
always kept the books; now he was the treasurer. Someone always took notes at meetings;
now there was a secretary. The presiding director was responsible for approving a meeting
agenda, and communicating with the URC and other outside groups. The URC liaison
originally had these responsibilities. The new structure, in other words, mattered most by
symbolizing a changed sense of group bonds, and by making the Cluster more autonomous
from the URC.
The Cluster ratified different group boundaries at that meeting too they defined a
different meaning of relationship to the wider world. On the new map, the Cluster would be
a partner, not a benevolent giver who knew what was best for the served. After the

In some social movement groups and other civic organizations, being serious or deeply committed
means eschewing formal positions. These groups encourage intensive participation by all members and rotate
leadership positions frequently. See for instance Barbara Epstein, Political protest and cultural revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Paul Lichterman, The search for political community:
American activists reinventing commitment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Wini Breines,
Community and organization in the new left (South Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin, 1982).

59

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crescendo of self-criticism from around the table, Betty gave a capsule history of the
Cluster and articulated its mission:
We worked as a conduit for volunteers, to go back to churches. Amidst that, we took
on the parish nurse and eviction prevention...
From around the table: Yes, yes.
Betty: ... Fools walk in where angels fear to tread! .... We took on things without
the structure to carry out.... Those of you doing hands-on work with kids, the after
school program ... in the perception of the people youre working with, we are not
givers and receivers but partners. We become not [emphasis hers] givers of the
community but partners of the community that we be perceived not as directors but
partners.
Evidently the point mattered enough for Betty to say it three times in the last sentence.
Even when doing hands on or direct service, Cluster members needed to keep in mind
that these one-to-one volunteer stints should be meaningful as part of a broader effort at
community-building. Most but not all Cluster members agreed heartily with Betty.
Cluster members already had imagined themselves on this broader social map of
partnership when they discussed the parish nurse. The nurse project took planning and
envisioning, and a sense of responsibility to ask critical questions, beyond carrying out
volunteer tasks. Cluster members imagined the nurse in relation to culturally distinct
populations and they tried to figure out how co-sponsorship would work with partner
agencies. Many months of planning for the nurse had resulted, finally, in a real nurse who
needed to be paid. As it came to fruition the nurse project tipped the Cluster definitively
toward partnership as its predominant style, away from the volunteer style. Of course it
would take close comparison cases to determine why the Cluster sometimes acted as a
partner to begin with, why members imagined the nurse as a focus for responsible
partnerships rather than task-oriented fundraising or helping-out. But given that initial,
shared imagination, the nurse precipitated a crisis that we can narrate with the help of neoinstitutionalists insights into why an organizations routine patterns of action ever change:
When an organization hosts different institutionalized routines, the practical consequences
of one routine may diminish the possibilities for keeping other routines going.60 In this
case, the Clusters volunteer style ultimately could not accommodate the consequences of
action the Cluster had initiated as a partnering group rather than a volunteer group. Tensions
over who to be and how to do things together had begun to threaten the groups basic sense
of its place. The small but emotional social drama61 at this meeting ratified the groups
move toward the partnership and came to a climax with Bettys poignant mission statement.
Broadened meanings, new social capacity. After the crisis meeting, then, the dominant
understanding of civic relationship in the Cluster broadened in a Tocquevillian direction:
Betty was saying Cluster members should be part of a larger, local we, rather than
servers whose own fortunes do not depend on those of the served. Good civic
relationships now required paying attention to other groups, becoming more a pro-active
member of the larger civic world, such that Cluster members would depend less on

60
61

See Clemens and Cook, Politics and institutionalism.

Victor Turner, Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974). See Myerhoffs use of the concept in Number our days.

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supervising social workers to work out those relationships for them. More routinely now,
members asked whether a proposed project was a county services project or a Cluster
project; the distinction was a more meaningful one now. They asked what neighborhood
residents thought about a proposed new neighborhood elementary school instead of
assuming they already knew. Relating to the neighborhood signified collaboration more
strongly now, rather than a simple doing good. It became more routine to ask and to
explore rather than only report, assign, or wait for answers from the URC liaison.
The Clusters social capacity increased noticeably too. Members increasingly got
involved in projects different from collecting money, coats, canned vegetables, or sandwich
bread, and other forms of helping out. Rather than working as representatives of aggregate
individual volunteer hours and donations, they carried out collective projects that required a
thicker sense of interdependence between members, and a willingness to challenge
institutional leaders: They organized a project to canvass Park neighborhood, in order to
discover residents own opinions about the newly proposed neighborhood school. They
organized a forum to enable residents to speak directly to the school board about the plan,
held conveniently in the neighborhood center basement. Cluster members celebrated an
invitation from the neighborhood center director to send representatives to a weekly
neighborhood forum with Park residents. The invitation would have made less sense to selfstarting, task-oriented volunteers with less of a collectivity to represent and less of a
collective ear to listen. But now, as partners, they could discover residents concerns, as
residents themselves stated them, instead of assuming the Cluster knew or that Family
Friends social workers knew what residents wanted. And only now, after the crisis meeting,
did I hear Cluster members arguing with the Park neighborhood social worker. They
disagreed with her over the administration of an eviction prevention fund that was
supposed to help residents short of their monthly rent to make the payment and avoid all the
disruption of a forced move. They were treating the social worker as a partner. She was
surprised and argued back that she was the expert. Overall, the Clusters social capacity
increased as it acted on new definitions of ties and a different sense of group bonds that
connected responsibility inside the group with responsibility to a variety of outside actors.
The Cluster was doing things together with a wider circle of citizens than previously,
depending less weightily on the Family Friends social worker for direction.

Group style or social capital?

The logic of the social capital concept, at bottom, would suggest that the Cluster evolved in
a Tocquevillian direction, toward more broadly defined civic relations and greater social
capacity, because of regular connections in the group.62 The capital metaphor induces us to
turn styles of relationship, kinds of civic projects qualities into quantities: older

62
See Putnam, Bowling alone, especially 288290; Fukuyama, The great disruption. This logic would be
harder to apply to groups strong in bonding social capital. The bonding/bridging distinction is not fully
integrated into the larger Tocquevillian sensibility informing the framework, though Putnam holds that most
civic groups have a combination of bonding and bridging capital, so that most groups have at least some
potential for the Tocquevillian spiral outward. In the present case, Park Cluster members all wanted to
bridge outward beyond the group, so it is appropriate at the outset to investigate the consequences of
regular connections. For a discussion of competing explanations of the Clusters evolution, see Lichterman,
Elusive togetherness.

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connections, more trust, bigger risks, scaled-up projects. While in the Clusters case, a
longer period of regular connections did precede a change in the networks, norms of
reciprocity, and trust that define Putnams social capital, the social capital concept by itself
does not help us appreciate the meanings that helped produce the change and set its timing.
Assessing Park Cluster in terms of social capitals three components strengthens the case
for the conceptual alternative.
Networks and norms of reciprocity
Before the crisis meeting, regular contacts and liaisons from outside the Cluster had
changed little. In the year after the crisis meeting, new people started attending Cluster
meetings regularly: These included a social worker from the Lakeburg school district, a
former school district employee, a businesswoman with real estate experience and ties to
Lakeburg municipal leaders, a Park neighborhood resident with neighborhood organizing
experience, other neighborhood residents including one who became the groups convener,
and most striking of all the Park neighborhood center director, who had been wary of
white church volunteers in her minority neighborhood from the start. Why did the Cluster
acquire these new and potentially valuable ties only after the crisis meeting, even though it
had been meeting regularly for many months?
At the crisis meeting, the Cluster ratified a set of customs that changed its official selfdefinition in relation to the Park neighborhood, its definition of reciprocity. Changes in the
length and substance of monthly meetings signified the change in customs. After the crisis
meeting, monthly meetings kept running over time, until they were officially lengthened by
a half hour, and still each meeting produced discussion items that needed to wait for the
next months discussion: There was more to ponder and question, in a group that now
defined itself as intentionally constructing its relations to partners inside and beyond the
neighborhood. Neighborhood canvassing and school board politics were longer-term
concerns that took more time, and more meetings, than organizing volunteers to make
sandwiches for the summer camp and pack Thanksgiving holiday baskets. The Cluster
intensified its efforts to make Park residents part of its agenda-setting, and discussed at
several meetings I attended how to make its meetings more appealing, accessible, useful, to
residents. As Betty said to general agreement, our mission is not met until we have people
from the neighborhood around the table.
In the mode of plug-in volunteering, Cluster members had acted more dependent on the
county social worker and URC liaison, and less collectively responsible themselves for
arranging their ties to the outside world including the neighborhood world just outside the
Clusters meeting space. Reciprocity with anyone other than the URC or the family services
agency had not been very salient. Until partnership became the routine, consistent,
dominant understanding of the group, there would be relatively little reason for members to
develop relations with a variety of outside leaders, no matter how regularly the Cluster met,
if the volunteers main mission was to carry out short-term tasks in the neighborhood. The
presence of school district or other municipal leaders at a meeting would not necessarily
affect the volunteer work of collecting Christmas presents or stocking and staffing the food
pantry. Later in the study, an active URC liaison still attended Cluster meetings but member
Liz was suggesting that the Cluster leave home and become autonomous from the URC.
It would have been hard to contemplate such a move earlier, when the URC liaison still was
providing over half the items on what were much shorter monthly meeting agendas.
The Clusters sense of reciprocity had changed as it developed stronger, more
autonomous obligations to its other partners in Park neighborhood. In the months after

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the crisis meeting, it made much more sense to the Cluster to welcome a real estate expert
or a school district administrator when, as partners, the Cluster had let itself become
involved in a campaign to build a new community center, and had begun carving out a role
as bridge-builder between the neighborhood and the school district when the district
considered building a Park neighborhood school. By then, a new URC liaison could goad
the group into staying involved with school board politics by reminding them at the start of
her pitch that this group has a reputation for being involved with Park neighborhood. The
comment would have made little sense early in my study, when an autonomous reputation
for the Cluster was much less developed and mattered less. In all, different meanings
shaped opportunities for expanding the Clusters networks, and making new kinds of
contact with pre-existing associates.
Lingering resistance to those meanings made their role in the Clusters outward-bound
civic spiral all the more obvious. Ned continued to prefer plug-in style volunteering. Neds
form of regular connection would threaten or even cut off other regular connections that
the social capital concept aims to count. Later in the study, Neds style was like a small
subculture within the group, characterizing the preferences of only 3 of the 12 core
members, though the others understood the style and could enact it when they signed up to
serve meals at the southeast Asian festival or run activities at the neighborhoods Christmas
party. To Ned, the whole effort spent developing stronger and more self-conscious ties with
the neighborhood center and its director was a waste of time, even after the Cluster received
an invitation to join two of the centers advisory boards two new opportunities for
expanding the Clusters network. Ned told me the Cluster ought to have been about
helping out and getting things done in the neighborhood without getting wrapped up in
difficult relationships with a difficult neighborhood center director, or expensive relationships with a parish nurse project. These, he strongly implied, were not good ways to help
out as volunteers. Unprompted, he said on another occasion that the Cluster was all
tangled up in the [planning for a] community center. Very few people are interested in doing
this [Summer Fun volunteering] the day-to-day work here. To Ned, new ties with the
neighborhood center director or real estate professionals were distractions from the real
work, the day to day work of volunteering, too.
When others in the group such as Betty and Liz asked the Cluster to clarify how it
related to the neighborhood center director and the other projects in the Park neighborhood,
Ned retorted at one meeting,
My vision in the early days was: a couple of people coming and meeting and helping
out. And for me its become way too mechanical. I dont think the Center had a vision
back then, it just existed......Id just as soon step back and let the Center tell me what it
needs. I question the need for this group.
Given the opportunity to work on more regular connections with a wider range of outside
parties, Neds customary understanding of good volunteering made him question the need
for regular ties at all. Were it up to him, the Cluster would have forgone new ties and would
have contracted its circle of reciprocity.

Trust
It would be misleading to say that Park Clusters networks and responsibilities expanded
because members trust of one another grew through regular connections, as social capital
thinking would have it. There are different kinds of trust, based on norms for qualitatively

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557

different kinds of relationships.63 Park Cluster ran on at least two different kinds of trust,
instantiated in different sets of customs, and each kind would support a group with
somewhat different priorities. The partnership form of trust meant mutual responsibility
inside a group for the sake of outside parties. Partnership trust was what Mary wanted to
build in the group when she argued at the crisis meeting that, having taken on the financial
responsibility of the parish nurse, the group needed the structure to carry it out. But there
was another kind of trust that Ned increasingly lacked in the group the longer it was in
existence: It was trust that ones fellow group members could carry out pre-defined tasks
and get the job done. Ned questioned the need for the Cluster altogether, more than once
hardly a statement of trust in group members and told me he thought he would bow out of
the Cluster and go work with the Family Friends county service agency because they had
more of a handle on what people needed in the neighborhood. Regular connections would
not cultivate trust in people who customarily had different ways of defining valuable ties
and valuable exchanges. Neds tone of voice made him sound deeply let down by the
group, his trust in the group further weakened, when he complained that very few Cluster
members were volunteering in Summer Fun. When I wondered if there were more Cluster
members doing volunteer work on other days, he frowned and said no quickly as if
waving off the very possibility. He did not trust them to carry out the tasks that seemed so
obviously valuable to him.
Of course, it also is the case that regular connections with the Cluster increased Neds
trust in the Family Friends agency. Cultivating trust in state agencies is not what
Tocqueville had in mind for civic groups, though, and it is not what the social capital
concept projects. Social capital is supposed to ease citizens abilities to do with, not give
them a taste for doing for as adjuncts to county social workers.
Silencing meaning, freezing dynamics
The social capital concept simplifies civic engagement by treating civic groups as static wholes
suitable for indexing. The concept grasps variation in the ties within or between these static
wholes with the generic, intuitively plausible distinction between bonding and bridging
capital. The benefit of simplifying in these ways is that we may attempt huge comparisons of
civic groups across regions or nations. But we pay a huge price for social capital.
First, we lose meanings. As scenes from the field in Lakeburg already show, group
bonds can mean quite different things to group members, and so can bridges. Ned and
Betty of Park Cluster both wanted to build bridges to the Park neighborhood. Ned spent
more time in the neighborhood and developed more regular contacts than Betty did during
this study, but it may not make much sense to say Ned had more bridging social capital.
Each defined bridge-building differently. Bettys definition was closer to the one that social
capital wants to honor, but to find that out we had to listen to how Betty and Ned talked
about the Cluster and what its relations meant to them. Group style sensitizes us to these
definitions, where social capital is silent. It is an irony worthy of Theodor Adorno that
social capital has become the preeminent concept for studying civic engagement, and yet is
deaf to the core activity of civic life: talk.64
63
See Robert Wuthnow, Trust as an aspect of social structure, 145167, in Jeffrey Alexander, Gary Marx,
and Christine Williams (Eds.), Self, social structure, and beliefs: Explorations in sociology (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); Vivianna Zelizer, Circuits of commerce, 122144, in Alexander,
Marx, and Williams, Self, social structure, and beliefs.
64
As Mark E. Warren put it, [I]n contrast to markets and bureaucracies, association is the form of social
organization that thrives on talk. See Warren, Democracy and association, 39.

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Second, we lose dynamics, especially if we think of bridges or bonds simply as

appendages to already existing groups. Bridges as well as bonds continually create groups
as members are relating to one another and the outside world, and the continual action of
maintaining a group opens at least hypothetical possibilities for change. Park Clusters
crisis was about what the group should be, in relation to whom; it was a crisis in the
meanings of bridges and bonds. The group resolved the crisis by communicating about it at
the crisis meeting. Members dared to remark on what they considered their groups own
shortcomings: Not only did they criticize their own loose group structure, but Dora said
with contrition that the Cluster had been operating with racial biases when dealing with
the Park neighborhood centers African American director. Even group dissident Ned
agreed with her and, with his characteristic regard for individual responsibility he promised
studious efforts to avoid that in the future. At a dramatic moment, Betty put forth a
distinct vision of the group. The group style concept highlights ongoing group-building,
attunes us to interaction, and alerts us to the possibility of clashing styles of building a
group. Social capital, in contrast, freezes groups, obscuring conflicting tendencies, and can
even push the analyst into circular reasoning about how bonding and bridging capital
explain a groups trajectory after the fact.65
The conceptual problems multiply when we remember that group style may vary by
setting. These differences matter especially if we want to understand the conditions that
facilitate or diminish citizens social capacity in relation to the state or other institutions.
The contrast between Park Cluster and Summer Fun camp is instructive here. Summer Fun
camp was sponsored by Park Cluster in conjunction with county social workers who
attended Cluster meetings, yet it cultivated styles of relationship quite different from those
the Cluster practiced increasingly at its monthly meetings. Camp sessions and Cluster
meetings were analytically as well as substantively very different settings. Cluster members
such as Ken lost the characteristics that match the intended, Tocquevillian definition of
social capital when they were volunteering at Summer Fun, or attending the social workers
meetings that were part of my larger study. At Summer Fun, Ken described Cluster
members as service providers in relation to the camp and the kids and that is how he
acted at the camp, too. He borrowed the customary social map of a plug-in volunteer,
imagining the volunteers subordinate to county social worker Mosley, helping others do
for a service population. He talked as a member of a volunteer-style group, in other words.
Yet at Cluster meetings, Ken talked about synergy doing with neighborhood residents
and worked hard to build partner-style relationships that honored Park residents own
opinions. Similar to Ken at Summer Fun, Cluster members who attended monthly social
workers meetings down the street from the neighborhood center went along with the role
that social workers cast them on social workers own turf: They were valuable, plug-in style
volunteers who could help assemble Thanksgiving food baskets for needy families, or staff
the food pantry. Cluster members I observed at these meetings never suggested that the
Cluster had other major roles too, though clearly the Cluster cultivated more social capacity
on its own time, as members planned and pondered and argued and re-drew the map of their
relationships. The differences between settings would disappear in a survey of social capital
in Park Cluster or the Park neighborhood.
I do not mean to suggest that the social capital concept has offered nothing for studies of
civic engagement. It depends on what we want to know. The best response to these and
previous criticisms of the social capital concept may be to approach research with a strong,

65

See Wilson, Dr. Putnams social lubricant; Portes, Social capital.

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559

Table 1 Comparing social capital and group style as approaches to civic engagement
Social capital

Group style

Focus of
observation

groups, memberships, individual behaviors and communication in relationships,

attitudes
in specific settings

Efficacy for civic

action

frequency or density of interpersonal or intergroup contacts; frequency of behaviors or

attitudes

definitions of relationships

Mechanisms of
change

high accumulation of contacts, groups, or

attitudes; length of relationships

redefinition or conflict over

meanings; external pressures and
inducements

Suitable research
questions
(examples)

Why do some people participate more than

others?
Why do some groups recruit more people than
others?
Which group contacts or ties create broad
alliances between groups?

How do civic relationships develop

over time?
How do civic relationships produce
goods?
Why do civic groups prefer some
goals to others?
How do civic groups succeed or fail
in meeting their own goals?

nuanced sense of the concepts limits alongside a realpolitik appreciation that the concept
already has propelled a lot of informative work. Tocquevillian questions slip through social
capitals large cracks, but the concept is a worthwhile tool for other questions that important
studies have asked about the conditions for building diverse social movements or recruiting
volunteers successfully.66 It is useful to know that some kinds of social ties or contacts, in
general, advance collective action more than others, and in those cases social capital is a
sensitive enough concept. We simply ought not to restrict our questions to the ones that the
social capital concept is fit to address. Table 1 compares Putnams version of social capital
and group style as conceptual tools for studying civic engagement.
Sometimes the broad-brushstroke metaphor of social capital is sufficient. Still, social
capital imagery silences and freezes the meanings, relationships, and communication that
matter for many research questions whether or not they are inspired by Tocquevillian
insights. Different group styles cultivate different goods, some more Tocquevillian than
others. It is not clear that we could deduce a criterion for knowing which groups to count
and which to exclude from an inventory of social capital in its neo-Tocquevillian definition.
It took ethnographic work to suggest that plug-in style volunteering makes a poor indicator;
ethnographic studies that compare particular group styles with Putnams social capital
concept are only now starting to come in from the field.67 The scenes in this article by no

66

On movement-building, see for instance Richard Wood, Faith in action; Mark R. Warren, Dry bones
rattling; Saegert, Thompson, and Warren, Social capital in low-income communities. On volunteer
recruitment, see Becker and Dhingra, Religious involvement and volunteering; John Wilson, Volunteering, Annual review of sociology 26 (2000): 215240.
67
See for instance, Ricca Edmondson, Studying civic culture ethnographically and what it tells us about
social capital: Communities in the west of Ireland, 5972, in Paul Dekker and Eric Uslaner (Eds.), Social
capital and participation in everyday life (London: Routledge, 2001).

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means represent all the group styles available in US civic culture.68 At least until we have
much more research on group styles and their consequences, we do best by unhitching
Tocqueville from the social capital concept.

Group style and democratic social capacities: Beyond Tocqueville

Although Tocqueville valued civil associations for their potential to enhance citizens social
capacity, it is unlikely he would have recognized plug-in style volunteering within his
democratic vision. We need a concept of group style to recognize the gaps between
Tocquevillian expectations, popular rhetoric about the value of volunteering, and real
practices in volunteer settings. Beyond what it illuminates about volunteering, group style
also helps us assess Tocquevilles insights on civic process while avoiding the traps of his
normatively toned argument: Tocqueville proposed, and many contemporary commentators
claim too, that in civic groups people change, their horizons broaden, their circles of
concern expand. But if civic groups take on enduring styles, that means they tend to
cultivate a shared, normative social map consistent horizons over time which may
change relatively rarely and only under special conditions. Democracy in America affirmed
the civic-minded habits of civil associations in general, contrasting them with the
privatizing tendencies of material striving. Probing group style enables us to describe
different modes of association and then assess empirically the goods these different modes
produce, rather than relying on either Tocquevilles sunny and vague projections or else
indices of ties, behaviors, and attitudes that miss some of the goods and liabilities that
matter in the Tocquevillian imagination.
Like Tocqueville, many democratic theorists across the political spectrum have valued
civil associations for their potential to cultivate social capacity. With social capital now a
nearly commonsense term for discussing civic groups and social capacity, it has become too
easy for contemporary writers to equate all three and use them interchangeably, sometimes
in Tocquevilles name. Some conservative and neoliberal visions of democracy celebrate
the virtues of local, non-political civic groups because they expect such groups to be
effective agents of social capacity translated in a facile way as social capital. To critical
observers, conservatives and neoliberals make civic groups an all too simple answer to
economic and social problems wrought by voracious markets and shrinking states. In the
critical view, social capital comes to look like little more than a foil for the ravages of
global capitalism and social capacity like the misguided concern of people who hope
bowling leagues and local faith-based groups will provide the social support that the state
no longer offers.69
A different vision would distinguish subject-matter (civic groups), theoretical lens
(social capacity), and empirical measure (social capital). It is sound sociology to ask how
civic initiatives of any sort can fill institutional gaps that grow when guaranteed welfare and
other rights and expenditures shrink. It is sound sociology, too, to investigate social
capacity by avoiding simple equations, treating civic groups dispassionately, and measuring
their goods and consequences carefully. We need not assimilate social capacity to social
capital. If social capital silences and freezes whatever it touches, that means it obscures a
68
For examples of other customs likely to be common across US civic life, see Lichterman, Elusive
togetherness; The search for political community; Becker, Congregations in conflict; Nina Eliasoph,
Avoiding politics.
69
See Somers, Beware Trojan horses bearing social capital.

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561

variety of civic styles and relationships, not all of which are as moralizing or anti-state as
the thousand points of light celebrated in conservative rhetoric and savaged in the critique
of neoliberalism. Civic groups play a role in civil society-centered and state-centered
visions of democracy and the group style concept can illuminate citizens potentials to
exercise social capacity in either.
Both classic and contemporary theorists have privileged civil society as the ultimate
guarantor of real democracy, a counter-balance to the administrative logics and elite
interests attributed to state actors. Because many of todays community service
organizations do fashion coalitions with state agencies, hardly always on the politically
conservative terms of the faith-based initiative, it is good to ask how civic groups and
state agencies coordinate their work together. To move beyond the simpler imagery of
Democracy in America, how much if at all do those arrangements cultivate social capacity?
A focus on group style is illuminating. Civic groups may construct different kinds of
working relationships with state agencies; the formal structure of state-sponsored social
service may influence but does not necessarily dictate the terms of collaboration with
citizen groups.70 In Park Cluster, partnership made the eviction prevention fund, for
instance, into a different project than it would have been had the Cluster stuck with a plugin volunteer style. As plug-in volunteers, Cluster members would have concentrated on
collecting church donations and would have trusted the family services agency to know
what was best for the neighborhood, instead of standing with neighborhood leaders and
challenging the agencys way of administering the fund. This small example pictures what
may look like a relatively small space for leeway in relations between civic groups and state
agencies, but people may cultivate social capacity in just such spaces.
Research on citizen-led efforts to expand democracy already has shown that social
capital can make the difference between effective pressure on the state and selfmarginalizing protest. The case of faith-based community organizing in the United States
illustrates what group style can add to the picture. Religious congregations are rich nodes of
social connections social capital that community organizers draw on for political
ends.71 It is worth asking how organizers and their constituencies construct the boundaries
and bonds that corral that capital. Community organizers sometimes promote a stark weversus-them map of social relationships that limits as well as energizes social capacity:
When Industrial Areas Foundation leaders proposed a community organizing initiative for
Lakeburg during this study, a local Lutheran pastor with community organizing experience
acknowledged that it was difficult to keep rank and file community activists involved, come
Monday morning after a successful pressure campaign: In practice, community
organizing campaigns may define a good group as one that is united for a win against
adversaries, more than one that thrives on civic interchange for its own goods. It is an
empirical question how common that practice is. In any event, group style has practical
consequences for enduring social capacity, even for groups that, in theory, value democratic
participation as a good in itself.72

70

For an argument that volunteer service has evolved to fit the structure of social service bureaucracies, see
Wuthnow, Loose connections.

71

Wood, Faith in action; Warren; Dry bones rattling.

In theory, community organizing in the Saul Alinsky tradition cultivates active citizenship as an end in
itself and not only a means to local political victories. See Stephen Hart, The cultural dilemmas of
progressive politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Harry Boyte, CommonWealth: A return to
citizen politics (New York: Free, 1989).
72

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Other recent studies envision a larger, more pro-active role for the state in expanding
democracy, and some of these too are influenced by the recent attention to social capital.73
Some of these studies investigate experiments in participatory governance around the globe,
including participatory municipal budget-writing in Brazil and citizen oversight boards for
schools and police forces in the United States.74 Others observe hybrid organizations that
combine state sponsorship and community initiative to serve distinct local populations such
as lesbian and gay people with AIDS, or at-risk youth from low-income families.75 In
these different examples, the state is sponsoring social capacity, giving ordinary people
resources and room to define the public relationships they want to have with others,
including the state itself. Group style is likely to shape outcomes in any of these cases.
Studies of participatory governance focus hopes for broader and deeper civic
participation on innovative institutional design. It still is an open question whether
institutional design can guarantee democratic, empowering results over the long haul, as
these authors already note. Even if legislation grants citizens new, formal decision-making
positions in assemblies funded with tax money, there is no guarantee that all citizens will
adopt the same style of participation. Democratic design does not necessarily make group
style into a constant. Group style clearly mattered in the case of participatory budgeting in
Brazil, for example, as citizens harbored sometimes surprising assumptions about what
budget meetings were for; some turned these hearings into freewheeling town hall
discussions or opportunities to make community announcements.76 In the case of hybrid
organizations it may be even less clear who is adapting to whose initiative, when civic and
state actors co-create projects from the very start. The group style concept enables us to
compare relationships and identities across the (shifting) lines between civil society and
state, offering a relational understanding of citizenship77 that saves us from reifying civic
and state sectors and assuming that whatever happens inside one sector must be
inherently different, or more or less empowering, from what happens inside the other.
If group styles potentially shape and sometimes limit social capacity over time, then
what of the Tocquevillian hope that civic participation would expand relationships in
public-spirited, empowering ways? Park Cluster did change, its horizons expanded, but the
more Tocquevillian partnership style was already alive in the group, if subordinate, from the
start. So with apologies to Hegel we might ask: To be a good citizen, must one be a member
of a group already blessed with a good style? It is both an empirical and theoretical question
for further work but not necessarily a cause for resignation among those with hopes for
democratic civic life. The case of Park Cluster along with writings on community
organizing offer some clues: People sometimes do reflect critically on the group routines
73

See Fung and Wright, Thinking about empowered participatory governance.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment, 4576, in Fung
and Wright (Eds.), Deepening democracy; Emergent public spheres: Talking politics in participatory
governance, American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 5274; Archon Fung, Deliberative democracy,
Chicago style: Grass-roots governance in policing and public education, 111143, in Fung and Wright
(Eds.), Deepening democracy.
74

75

Michael P. Brown, Replacing citizenship (New York: Guilford, 1997); Nina Eliasoph, Scrambled moral
worlds: The case of U.S. youth civic engagement groups (book manuscript, Department of Sociology,
University of Southern California, 2006); Nicole Marwell, Privatizing the welfare state: Nonprofit
community-based organizations as political actors, American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 265291.

76

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and citizens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
See Margaret Somers, Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: Law, community, and political
culture in the transition to democracy, American Sociological Review 58: 587620; Baiocchi, Militants and
citizens.
77

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they have taken for granted or put up with in half-conscious dissatisfaction, the way Dora
and Betty endured Park Clusters earlier style. American community advocates teach
grassroots activists to distinguish between private and more communal forms of interest,
between patronage and more democratically accountable forms of exchange.78 To the
extent these workshops of democracy teach their lessons effectively, they are cultivating
citizens abilities to reflect critically on group boundaries and bonds, and change the ways
they go about public life. To grasp these possibilities for critical self-reflection and change
in theoretical terms we do well to move beyond Tocqueville and borrow from the
pragmatist imaginations of John Dewey and Jane Addams.79 Still a signal, Tocquevillian
contribution shines through: Citizens democratic aspirations and governments ambivalent
tendencies all are subject to the customs of group life. Democratic political theory remains
an incomplete, misleading guide to practice without this inconvenient and salutary insight.

Acknowledgments Many thanks for attentive and helpful comments from Michael Schudson, David
Smilde, Juliet Musso, Chris Weare, and Theory and Society reviewers. I learned, too, from responses to
the earlier, partial versions of this article presented at the Georgia Workshop on Culture and Institutions, the
American Sociological Association, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Sociology Department, and the
Civic Engagement Initiative workshop at the University of Southern California.

Paul Lichterman currently is Associate Professor of Sociology and Religion at the University of Southern
California. His first book, The Search for Political Community (Cambridge University Press, 1996),
investigated different styles of politics in the U.S. environmental movement. Lichtermans recent book
Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge Americas Divisions (Princeton University Press,
2005) compares nine religious, community service groups responding to welfare reform, showing how these
evangelical and mainline Protestant groups tried and often failed to reach out to other organiztions and lowincome people. He is continuing his research on the cultural, institutional, and political conditions for civic
life in a new project that re-theorizes civic engagement.

78
79

See for instance Harry Boyte, CommonWealth.

See Lichterman, Elusive togetherness; John Dewey, The public and its problems; Jane Addams,
Democracy and social ethics, with an introduction by Charlene H. Seigfried (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2002 [1902]).

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