Exploring ‘unseen’ social capital in community participation: everyday lives of poor mainland Chinese migrants in Hong Kong by Sam Wong (Amsterdam: Amsterdam university press, 2007, pp. 219,).

✍ Scribed by Deljana Iossifova

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 31 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1518

✦ Synopsis

In his first book, Exploring 'Unseen' Social Capital in Community Participation: Everyday Lives of Poor Mainland Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong, Sam Wong draws on his ethnographic research findings to propose a 'pro-poor' alternative to mainstream social capital theorising. Wong claims that the (neo-)institutional approach to social capital fails to assess the complexity of social capital building adequately, and suggests an 'agency-institution-structure' framework in order to uncover what he calls 'unseen' social capital-the informal, subtle and less instrumental nature of everyday interactions between, in this case, poor migrants in Hong Kong.

Wong identifies the shortcomings of the mainstream neo-institutional view on social capital in its over simplification, its focus on institutional environment and governance, and its neglect of socially embedded institutions. His critique addresses two underpinning assumptions about human behaviour in neo-institutional thinking: that actors will pursue their best interest by making choices within institutional constraints, and that individual preferences and purposes can be shaped by institutional forces within institutionally imposed constraints. For neo-institutional thinkers, design principles constitute norms, values and rules, aiming towards minimisation of free riding and maximisation of benefits. Wong doubts the effectiveness of design principles in enhancing poor people's livelihood and claims that human beings are conscious and unconscious social agents; that incentives of cooperation can include altruistic and moral concerns; and that actions are embedded in social and cultural values. He distinguishes between 'seen' social capital, 'judged by the visibility of collective action and the quantities of organisations' (p. 41), and 'unseen' social capital, 'embedded in submerged networks which are less visible, less functional and less organised' (p. 179), located outside structured social groups, and only to be captured via long-term (lifetime) analysis. He claims that both types of social capital and their interrelations need to be understood in order to improve poor people's livelihoods.

Wong suggests including this interplay between bureaucratic and socially embedded institutions through an analysis of social capital, leading him to propose an 'agency-institution-structure' framework to better understand the nature of social relationships, re-connect institutions, social capital and poverty and achieve a 'pro-poor' social capital perspective. This framework examines three interrelated factors-agency (understanding people as active agents of collective action within a complex context), institution (understanding the interplay between institutions and social structure as a challenge to existing social structure and a means to reinforce structural inequalities) and structure (understanding structure as both enabling and constraining for actors).

Adopting a proclaimed realist approach to ethnography, Wong applies ethnographic methods to explore the 'messiness of social reality' (p. 30)-evaluating the gap between the neo-institutional design framework and actual migrant behaviour; locating migrants' accounts in a broader social and institutional context; and examining 'access to, and distribution of, social capital and power relations in communities' (p. 47). He explores these issues at length on the individual, organisational and community level, and concludes that effective intervention towards poverty alleviation depends on the history and culture of social cooperation, existing relations, people's livelihood priorities, individuals' preferred social environment and the interplay between new and old institutions (p. 192). Hence, as policy makers should allow longer periods to evaluate projects, ready to improvise in order to meet people's needs, researchers should rethink the concept of social capital to include the 'unseen'.

In providing an alternative to mainstream approaches, this book makes for an interesting contribution to the discourse on social capital and collective action. It is based on the author's doctoral dissertation (for which he obtained the 'ICAS Book Prize' and the 'IIAS Best PhD Thesis Award' in 2005) and structured accordingly-including a thorough literature review and a relatively lengthy chapter on methodology. Yet, given Wong's emphasis on the importance of ethnographic methods and the ethnographic nature of his research, the actual presentation of ethnographic content appears rather dry, and is therefore slightly disappointing. Including more illustrations (such as the 'Social life