IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 27

special section introduction

Jeremy pitt

andrzeJ
nowak

The Reinvention of Social Capital
for Socio-Technical Systems

S

ocial capital has been defined by Ostrom
and Ahn [1] as "an attribute of individuals
that enhances their ability to solve collective action problems." They observed that
social capital has multiple forms, including a notion
of "trustworthiness," social networks including weak
and strong ties, and institutions, i.e., those collections
of conventional rules by which people mutually agree
to regulate their behavior. They also suggested that
trust was the "glue" that enabled these various forms
of social capital to be leveraged for solving collective
action problems, for example, the sustainability of a
common-pool resource. However, we are concerned
that trust is being undermined to the detriment of
social capital, thereby adversely affecting our ability to address collective action problems. In developing socio-technical systems for successful collective
action, for example in SmartGrids, we need to "reinvent" social capital, and discover a new "glue."

"Social Acetate"
The gradual erosion of trust (as the "glue" binding social capital to successful collective action) is
being caused by three social, economic, and political
forces. First, there is the creeping managerialism that
is infecting many forms of public and professional
life. There seems to be a wholesale adherence by the
bureaucratic corps to the adage that "everything can
be measured; and if it can be measured, then it can
be managed." Consequently, for example, there is an
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2301884
Date of publication: 10 March 2014

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SprING 2014

increasing influence of h-index and journal impact
factors in academia as criteria for appointments,
tenure, promotions, and so on - diminishing actual
scholarship in place of a metric in sharp defiance of
both Goodhart's Law (that any metric which becomes
a target ceases to carry any semantic value), and the
fact these metrics can be, and are, manipulated.
Second, there is the increasing commodification of
social relationships and the distortion of social concepts. Social networking sites that numerate the number of links diminish the human dimension of social
relationships - friends used to be people to be counted
on, not just people to be counted. Equally, "loyalty"
programs tend to work one way, and incentivize shopping around rather than creating a mutual bond over
time - existing customers, especially those who find
themselves locked in, can find themselves subject
to much worse terms and conditions than those who
ephemerally flit from company to company. Similarly,
the damage that has been done to the concept of privacy
in recent years has been well documented [2] - not just
by recent revelations about the NSA, but especially in
the U.K., the infiltration of legitimate protest groups by
undercover police officers.
Third, both bureaucracies and governing elites in
whatever form of government - from dictatorships to
(so-called) democracies - seem to have a growing distaste for those who are governed. In the U.K., public
institutions are staffed by products of a private education system that was designed to produce cohorts to run
an empire. The school system detached children from
their families and reattached them to the institution -
this was necessary to staff the institutions for colonial
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