From family to fellowship: defining multiple forms of bonding social capital and pathways through values and time use analysis
Roger Patulny
Social Policy Research Centre
Contact Email:   Roger.Patulnystudent.unsw.edu.au

Prominent social capital researchers such as Woolcock and Narayan insist upon the multiple dimensional nature of social capital, most particularly on its distinction into bonding forms (based on familiarity and interpersonal ties) and bridging forms (based on more impersonal symbolism). The bridging network is quite well defined, characterized by generalised trust and charitable volunteering action. The bonding networks, however, coalesce around numerous social domains. The most primal of these is the family unit, though other social domains represent potentially distinct bonding networks, whether formal (work/professional, religion/church, union member) or informal (family, friends, virtual group). Each network is characterised by its own distinctive forms of internal trust, driven in turn by values and voluntary efforts peculiar to/on behalf of the network; for example, family social capital is underpinned by the importance one places on the family (trust related value) and engagement in domestic labour (volunteering). In addition, each network has a potential confounding or reinforcing effect upon the others. Banfield’s classic work suggests that extreme bonding forms of social capital such as family can crowd out bridging social capital; recent evidence from Stone and Hughes refutes this, however. Noting then the family as the most prime unit of bonding, this paper sets out to identify appropriately distinct intermediate bonding networks (friends, work, religion, union, virtual), and to elucidate the effects of all such bonding networks upon the larger generalised bridging network (support or crowding out). Seeking to do so in terms of values and practices that support the network, this paper presents principal components and regression data from two surveys appropriate to capturing such data - the World Values Survey and ABS Time Use survey

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