Social capital,network governance and the strategic delivery of grassroots sport in England

Abstract

There has been a growing debate concerning the increasing salience of sport to government in the UK and the role and value of community-level sport policy. Much of this debate has centred on the role of voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) and the extent to which they can contribute to the creation of social capital. This paper contributes to this debate through a case study of sport policy implementation in England. The case study firstly highlights the strategic importance attached to social capital and its associated policy context and secondly presents key stakeholder interpretations of the likelihood that VSCs will act as agents of delivery. The analysis is served by three considerations. Firstly, what is the political and policy context for a strategic orientation to social capital? Secondly, how does this orientation relate to stakeholder perceptions of what VSCs do? Thirdly, how do stakeholder perceptions of what VSCs do affect their perceptions of how they do it? The analysis is informed by a series of 14 semi-structured interviews with a number of key stakeholders and a range of public documents produced by government, local authorities and regional agencies. The conclusions suggest that, firstly, the democratic form of social capital is most dominant in relation to sport policy and, secondly, that when considered alongside VSC stakeholder perceptions, then anticipated democratic social capital outcomes may become distorted and even corrupted.

Keywords

governance modernisation policy social capital volunteering

Introduction

It is not new for governments to implement social policy through the medium of sport. Sport policy has at times been considered a sub-set of social policy itself (e.g. Coalter, 2007a; Green, 2008; Green and Houlihan, 2006; Grix, 2009) and consequently may comprise one of the tools that policymakers can call on to effect social change. Indeed, the United Nations (2003: 5) has argued that sports programmes are ‘a cost-effective way to contribute significantly to health, education, development and peace and a powerful medium through which to mobilize societies’. Similarly, Houlihan and Groeneveld (2011: 1) identify a growing number of national governments that seek to use sport ‘in the pursuit of a range of pro-social policy objectives such as social inclusion, health improvement and community integration and safety’. The global interest in sport and social capital heightens the value of taking a backwards glance at the New Labour government of the UK, which held power from 1997 to 2010. The purpose of this article then is to provide an example of sport policy implementation in one country. The case study of sport policy implementation in England highlights, firstly, the strategic importance attached to social capital and its associated policy context and, secondly, presents evidence from key stakeholders concerning the likelihood of voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) acting as agents of delivery. The analysis is served by three considerations. Firstly, what is the political and policy context for a strategic orientation to social capital? Secondly, how does this orientation relate to stakeholder perceptions of what VSCs do? Thirdly, how do stakeholder perceptions of what VSCs do affect their perceptions of how they do it?

The first question requires an understanding of the shift to network governance and the applicability to sport policy of the broader recognition of the complexity and fragmentation that exists across different areas of public policy (Skelcher, 2000). It is within this framework that the second and third questions address notions of social capital, its privileging as an organising concept and the promotion of partnerships, alliances and networks as the key delivery mechanisms in the application of sport policy. Certainly, modernisation has provided for an increase in this complexity, which is a key facet of the contexts within which a shift from government to new modes of governance has been recognised (Pierre and Stoker, 2000).

Modernisation has sought to reorganise, reshape and re-order sport participation in line with utilitarian values (Clarke, 2005; Finlayson, 2003; Newman, 2001). Evidence has been promoted as the underpinning feature of policy development, allowing evidence-based policy to become common currency in the language of policy development (Grix, 2009; Houlihan and Green, 2009; Sanderson, 2002; Solesbury, 2001). Moreover, concerning this organisational landscape there is broad agreement about the transition from hierarchical ‘government’ or market-based modes of co-ordination to governance based upon ‘self-organising, inter-organisational networks characterised by interdependence’ (Rhodes, 1997: 15). For example, governing bodies of sport and national sport organisations, in many countries, are part and parcel of systems that engage a plurality of actors, share knowledge and expertise and should, in theory, increase efficiency and effectiveness of delivery (Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden, 2004). Writers in the USA (e.g. Thilbault et al., 1999), England (Bolton et al., 2008; Lindsey, 2009), and Canada (Alexander et al., 2008) have commented on the increasing prominence of local partnerships and other forms of alliances involving sport organisations that have arguably provided ‘a new legitimacy to community sport development’ (Bolton et al., 2008: 94). A consequence of this shift is that networks and partnerships have become considered the dominant and most effective modes of policy-making and influencing policy-making. Thus, network governance (referred to as the governance narrative or differentiated policy model, see Bevir and Rhodes, 2003, 2008; Sørensen and Torfing, 2008) describes the inclusion of a range of actors and agents in diffusing or eroding power in the policy process away from those who govern (in government) to the governed (those who make up specific polities). Certainly, network governance as a process of decision making is reliant on an assumption that actors will be empowered to implement policy decisions away from those who govern. Some writers, such as Marsh (2008) and Bingham (2011), have been critical in cautioning against this assumption and have pointed out that governance networks may not necessarily be representative of particular communities, and may indeed lead or entrench local power inequalities.

It is within the context of network governance that social capital has had much purchase in recent years, particularly as it has been promoted and embraced as the mechanism in the promotion of connectiveness, trust, civic renewal and active citizenship (Imrie and Raco, 2003; Levitas, 2000; Maloney et al., 2000). Certainly, much has been written about sport policy and the influence and importance of social capital theory (e.g. Adams, 2010; Blackshaw and Long, 2005; Coalter, 2007b; Nicholson and Hoye, 2008). That this is not in doubt can be attributed to two reasons in particular. Firstly, social capital offers a theoretical basis for promoting and interpreting the social benefits of sport organisation and participation. Social capital, in this respect, has provided an explanatory mechanism to show how sport can contribute to establishing tolerance, social cohesion, and adherence to moral frameworks (Halpern, 2005; Smith and Waddington, 2004). Secondly, the dominant conceptualisation of social capital, based primarily on the writings of Robert Putnam, has focused attention on the voluntary sector around which sport is predominantly centred. Certainly, across the (Anglophone) world, sport is often the single largest area of volunteering and, accordingly, VSCs are often viewed as a convenient location for macro policy implementation where a realignment to network governance has been viewed as a means to effective delivery.

This paper argues that the reliance on a precise form of social capital characterised the UK government’s approach to modernisation as a process to shape agendas and structural conditions via network governance, in an essentially top-down and centralised policy process (Cabinet Office, 1999; Finlayson, 2003). This process in sport, which has been referred to as an ‘asymmetrical model’ of power relations (Grix and Phillpots, 2010; Marsh, 2008), entailed a top-down resource-dependant governance network around which social capital was incorporated to balance the anticipation of bottom-up, autonomic participation. For Grix and Phillpots (2010: 8), this resource dependency has resulted in ‘the state shaping not only sport policy, but sport development more widely and is mirrored in grass-roots policy delivery’. It is this aspect that provides the critical evaluation of social capital as suggested by the questions above and eschews an approach that assumes that measures of social capital can be aggregated upwards from the individual to societal level or based simply upon network density (DeFilippis, 2001; Fine, 2001; Mohan and Mohan, 2002). To do justice to this analytical framework, the paper first outlines some of the critical aspects of the political and policy context before exploring the strategic embedding of social capital in the sport policy domain at local authority level. The paper then goes on to interrogate whether any interpretation of a strategic orientation to creating social capital has impacted on sport policy implementation through VSCs. Finally, the paper discusses some of the consequences, for both policy makers and policy takers, of constructing strategic orientations to deliver policy based on singular interpretations of social capital.

Social capital and its policy context in the UK

The focus of the following section is to provide an insight into the political climate of the UK from the late 1990s onwards that enabled social capital to have such a purchase on sport and social policy. The hinterland of modernisation arguably contains the core tenets of New Public Management (NPM), which emerged alongside the neo-liberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Burnham and Pyper (2008: 53) argue that NPM can be seen as a loose-knit collection of ideas for improving performance rather than as a coherent governing ideology. For some commentators (Evans, 2009: 35) this has meant ‘that NPM has been unequal to the task of managing networked governance’¹ which, for the implementation of social capital theory through sport policy, has important potential ramifications that shall be returned to later. NPM has facilitated modernisation, enabling practices such as performance management and measurement to continue and to have a ‘far reaching and enduring’ influence (Heinrich, 2011: 262). However, NPM marries individualism with competition (Peck and Tickell, 2002) and, together with other influences such as globalisation, marketisation and privatisation (Massey and Pyper, 2005), enables or positions modern governments as ‘governing without government’ (Rhodes, 1997). In this respect the traditional responsibilities and obligations of the state are contracted out to others and a form of network governance where targets are set, audits implemented and regulatory frameworks enjoy prominence becomes the norm. In this regard not only are practices reflexive in that they are constantly examined and altered in light of incoming information about those practices (Giddens, 1991), but also in that they facilitate planning and marketing (Giddens, 1990). This pragmatist approach to policy-making was arguably the dominant discourse surrounding the development of sport in the UK from 1997 to 2010 (Houlihan and Green, 2009).

The debates surrounding NPM tend to reveal a general agreement that modernisation has ensured that government is giving way to governance (Bevir and Rhodes, 2003; Grix, 2009; Marsh, 2008; Rhodes, 1997). In the sport policy field this trend is no different, with Green (2008), for example, arguing that 1997’s election of New Labour in the UK brought a more collaborative set of arrangements at both policy-making and management levels, which Grix (2009) has argued is more strategic, joined up and forward looking. Certainly in the UK after 1997 partnerships were very much the delivery mode of choice and the identification of social capital as the mechanism combined in promoting a highly persuasive and integrated delivery structure. The grass roots basis of sport opportunities, coupled with the importance of voluntary action for sport participation to occur, put VSCs in the front line of the relationship between sport, social policy and the creation of social capital. In part this is indicative of the rhetorical function of modernisation, which is often cited as a central theme in policy-making processes (e.g. Adams, 2011; Houlihan and Green, 2008). According to Rose (2001: 37), processes become influenced because of the persuasiveness of the term in showing ‘a preference for what is new rather than what is old, and for change against the status quo. But it does not identify what direction change should take’. In other words, the strategic emphasis held within the power of modernisation to shape policy discourses ensured that concerns for effectiveness, the means for effecting policy change and collaboration, and not just competition (Houlihan and Green, 2006, 2009), dominated UK policy-making during this period.

New Labour, under first Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, shifted government policy provision towards ‘increasing pressure to transfer its power downwards to local agencies, upwards to global bodies and sideways to inter-regional organisations’ (Roberts and Devine, 2003: 312). For example, the Modernising Government White Paper in 1999 introduced a range of changes based on market testing, market assimilation and individualism that built on the Treasury’s 1998 publication Modern public services for Britain, which introduced public service agreements that tied departmental budgets to specific performance targets. In terms of service delivery, the Gershon review (2004) and the Varney review (2006) both sought efficiency savings and developing responsiveness to the needs of individuals and businesses. Furthermore, Gordon Brown, in his first speech on community issues as Prime Minister in 2007, signalled that he wanted ‘…a new partnership of individuals, independent community organisations and a government working together to empower and help all those working for social change’ (Brown, 2007).

For the sport policy domain, the drive to involve the third sector within this modernised approach to service delivery was a logical step, given that most opportunities to participate in organised sport in England are made through VSCs (Adams and Deane, 2009; Harris et al., 2009). These small voluntary organisations are themselves often subject to policy-led demands, direction and conditionality from various sport and non-sport organisations. These organisations include, but are not limited to, specific national governing bodies (NGBs),² national sport agencies, such as Sport England, and particular local authorities.³ However, in line with NPM, observers such as Houlihan and Green (2009), Green and Houlihan (2006), Green (2008) and Grix (2009) have pointed to the imposition of central targets, directives and performance indicators, the importing of best business practices and the fragmented nature of sport policy delivery as the key to modernising and modernised structures upon which sport development and participation in the UK increasingly rests. The upshot has been that whilst democratic renewal and continuous service improvement have been at the heart of modernisation, it is the ‘rights and responsibilities’ rhetoric (Giddens, 1998) that has formed the blueprint for government to ‘breathe new life into our democracy’ (Blunkett, 2001: 2). In this regard, encouraging people to become active citizens, a prime means of civic regeneration, was vital to New Labour’s overriding aim to reduce social exclusion by emphasising the ‘organisational capacities of communities’ (Coalter, 2007a: 538). Thus, democratic renewal and continuous service improvement (Pratchett, 2002) have provided the focus of the dominant policy context (Casey, 2004; Lewis, 2005; Maloney et al., 2000) within which VSCs have been able to act since 2000.

Insofar as social capital-infused policy development is concerned in the sport domain, former Prime Minister Brown’s emphasis on using the mutuality, trust, reciprocity and collectivism of VSCs rested on the use of the power of partnerships as a transformative phenomenon. Under New Labour, partnerships became the vehicle through which individualism was expressed within a collective and mutual approach to problem solving. This is an approach that Bingham (2011) argues was not only a response to a fragmented institutional context, but also was an attempt to reach collaborative solutions of many, so-called, ‘wicked issues’, often associated with community development. Certainly, in regards to community development the enabling role of government was not only to empower actors within partnerships, but also to position those partnerships, both temporally and spatially, as having key roles to play to help those working for ‘social change’. It is in this regard that the significant turn to the ‘personalisation’ agenda, exhibited during New Labour’s third term in office (1992–1997), was accepted and extended by the incoming UK coalition government’s⁴ ‘Big society’ as a big idea that encompassed a number of processes of policy reform. For Lord Wei, a former coalition government adviser on ‘Big Society’, it described ‘a set of policies to give more powers to people closer to where they live, to help increase the capacity and resources of civil society to take up such powers, and to encourage a sense of collective progress and momentum since it can be hard to “bowl alone”’ (Hansard, 2010). The change of UK government from New Labour to a Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats, in May 2010, would appear to maintain and even promote a continued reliance on the tenets of the governance narrative. The emphasis from Prime Minister David Cameron on ‘Big Society’⁵ indicates that the emphasis on multi-agency partnerships aimed at promoting civil society, active citizenship and civic renewal promoted under New Labour between 1997 and 2010 is to continue, if not be enhanced.

Social capital and policy implementation

The direct reference to Putnam’s metaphor of bowling alone, and identifying the need for community solutions to collective problems, signals a continuity of the policy context within which social capital has flourished and become accepted within the sport policy domain. The allusion to bowling alone reaffirms a political context, within which collective action within a voluntary association based on mutual aid is privileged, almost without challenge, as one of the key policy tools in achieving social policy objectives within a modernised policy framework (Kendall, 2009). In the UK, the emergence of the Conservative-led coalition government’s ideological concern with reducing the size and scope of the state has further promoted an emphasis on the voluntary action of citizens (Smith, 2010). In short, individual citizens operating within the realms of civil society are encouraged to provide services more efficiently and effectively for fellow citizens through a networked alliance where governance seeks to simultaneously empower and enable. This approach to policy-making, founded on the work of Robert Putnam (1993 and 2000 in particular), has been termed the democratic strain (Lewandowski, 2006) of social capital. Whilst this strain of social capital enjoys political dominance, it is important to note that two other strains also compete for political and policy-making attention.

It is not the purpose of this article to outline and interrogate the theoretical dimensions of the seminal contributions of each the three leading figures (Robert Putnam, Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman) and the concomitant strains of social capital that have followed (democratic, critical and rational). These can be found elsewhere in a range of sophisticated accounts (e.g. Baron et al., 2000; Bartkus and Davis, 2009; Field, 2003; Johnston and Percy-Smith, 2003; Lewandowski, 2006). However, interpretations of social capital are crucial to understanding how and why policymakers have appropriated this concept within the modernised policy context set out above. Indeed, whilst it is possible that meaning can be lost in condensing much of the conceptual debate concerning social capital, the key ideas that form the basis of the democratic social capital can be found in Table 1. Certainly, the emphasis on volunteerism and the potential for social benefits that may emanate from individual citizen involvement in collective activity has been taken up by sport and sport development policy with gusto (Adams, 2010; Blackshaw and Long, 2005; Coalter, 2007a; Nicholson and Hoye, 2008).

Table 1.

Democratic social capital: some key assumptions.

Networks and connections are of primary importance.

Individuals create community via their normative capacity as social facts.

Individualism can be reconciled into collective action.

Normatively, trust and reciprocity are created or arise from social networks.

Civil society is idealised and voluntary associationalism is identified as both indicator and creator of social capital.

Voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) and the volunteering occurring within them are privileged as the place and means to establish an active citizenry and a civic culture.

Expansion of voluntary associations ‘encouraged’ to increase capacity to fulfil functions ascribed to civil society by government, in particular promoting a vision of a normalised and centralised community.

Standardisation, linked to modernisation, is necessary to manage this aspect of civil society

Sources: Lewandowski (2006); Putnam (1993, 2000); Field (2003); Portes and Landolt (1996); Johnston and Percy-Smith (2003).

The importance of social capital within a modernised policy context can be felt in the drive to mainstream and centralise active citizenship within a networked approach to establishing civic renewal and community development (Finlayson, 2003; Kendall, 2009; Morisson, 2003). Certainly, the high dependence on volunteers in Britain to provide the majority of sport participation opportunities (Taylor et al., 2003) and who allegedly make a ‘critical contribution’ to the building of a ‘strong and cohesive society’ (Neuberger, 2007: 3) highlights the importance of social capital theory to interpreting the sport policy domain. The broader policy context within which sport policy sits stems from the drive to develop a mixed economy of welfare (Kendall, 2000), which itself was institutionalised principally through the establishment of the British Compact in 1998 (Home Office, 1998). Moreover the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) in December 1997, the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (NRU) in 2001 and the Active Community Unit (ACU) in 2002 focused attention on the need for government to enable citizens and communities to be active and empowered. More recently, the signing of a new Compact between government and the third sector (2010), the creation of an Office for Civil Society and a turn to ‘Big Society’ and its emphasis on ‘community engagement and regeneration’ (Alcock, 2010) has helped to reinforce the need for a structural framework for citizens to develop the capacity for the formation of social capital. Under New Labour, a range of policy tools and levers were necessary to enable citizens to be socially included in a sort of ‘hyperactive mainstreaming’ (Kendall, 2009) that ensured that an ‘institutionally thick arena’ had become the norm (Imrie and Raco, 2003).

In 2002, the Prime Minister’s Strategy unit report – Social Capital: A Discussion Paper (Aldridge et al., 2002) – identified the ways government might try to promote the accumulation of social capital. The report identified a number of ‘levers’ for influencing policy at the individual, community and national levels, which included greater support for families and parenting, mentoring, volunteering; promoting institutions that foster community, dispersing social housing and using personal networks to pull individuals and communities out of poverty; and measures to facilitate mutual trust (Aldridge et al., 2002: 9). Many of these levers were incorporated into public policy by New Labour, although they were not necessarily articulated in the language associated with the concept. In the case of sport policy, the appeal of the democratic school was that it accepted and expected certain outputs to be statistically generated and, hence, presented a thesis that purported to be quantifiably demonstrable (Grix, 2001; Lewandowski, 2006). To this end, the acceptance of democratic social capital theory tended to reinforce popular concerns about sport and helped to ensure that subsequent sport policy was rooted in two dominant assumptions. Firstly, a benign view of sport that assumes the generation of communal-level benefits that accrue as public goods from individuals. Secondly, that sport as a social institution and a rather homogenous activity will, given the appropriate structural conditions, manufacture outputs commensurate with broader political and policy goals.

Within the sport policy domain, the situation for VSCs became less clear cut, in part because of the mutual aid aspect of VSCs, but also because of the increased salience of sport to government (Green, 2008; Houlihan and Green, 2009), the adoption of an overly positive view of sport (based on its mythopoeic status, Coalter, 2007b) and a general belief among policy makers and many sport organisations that investment in sport could reap social dividends The net result was that government not only sought partnerships with VSCs, but also looked to incorporate them into meeting wider policy objectives. In the foreword to Game Plan the Prime Minister stated that

Sport is a powerful and often under-used tool that can help government to achieve a number of ambitious goals. We have to be sure we are well equipped to do that (Department for Culture, Media and Sport/Strategy Unit, 2002: 5).

It is clear that the drive was on development through sport (Houlihan and White, 2002) or ‘sport plus’ (Coalter, 2007a), both of which refer to the pragmatic capacity of sport participation to encompass and reaffirm societal-level outcomes from individual participation. Lord Coe, Chairman of London’s organising committee for the 2012 Olympics, in stating that ‘sport is the hidden social worker in society…And, of course, it is inclusive and open to all’ (Observer, 2008: S1), has also reaffirmed this dominant discourse and perception of sport institutions being virtuous, inclusive and welcoming.

The key point here is that social capital, under the gaze of NPM and allied to wider community development concerns, became a key fixture of the accountability culture within and across the New Labour government. Together with an ‘ideology’ (Grix, 2009) of hegemonic ‘managed capitalism’ (Rustin, 2004), steerage of NGBs and VSCs was not only legitimated, but became one of a variety tools that helped to explain the nature of power relationships between state and civil society. Indeed, the whole notion of conditionality, where government seeks to exert control whilst not formally undermining the authority of a particular actor (Green, 2008), can be viewed as an exercise in ‘preference shaping’ (Hay, 2002). Moreover, the NPM focus on measurable evidence has also served to reinforce and legitimate the democratic strain of social capital, which itself has sought to identify ‘causality’, ‘culprits’ and solutions (Putnam, 2000) for policy problems involving perceived social capital deficits. The promotion of social capital through sport has been strategically linked to wider intended government outcomes and, voiced through Sport England and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), has been increasingly attached to particular funding streams that have specific aspects of conditionality built in. Certainly, the conditions themselves have tended to reflect New Labour’s overriding concerns with democratic renewal and the strategic role of social capital. Consequently, the operational and strategic conditions for VSCs are located within a framework predicated on compliance and conformity, and based on the need for appropriate evidence of efficiency and effectiveness (see Coalter, 2007b; Solesbury, 2001)

The visions heralding this structure were set out by the DCMS in A Sporting Future for All (2000), Game Plan (2002) and, more latterly, through the review of resources evidenced in the Carter Report (2005). Certainly, for New Labour, VSCs formed part of a co-ordinated attempt to engage citizens: they were embedded in the wider strategic aims of government policy, and were an integral part of an underpinning framework based on a Putnamian view of social capital and a reinvigorated civil society. It is in this respect that this paper contends that a strategic orientation to form social capital has normatively become embedded in local authority practices in dealing with small voluntary organisation, such as VSCs. This strategic orientation, evident in the following case study, also attends to the perceptions of those on the receiving ends of strategic approaches, and it is interesting to note how the conflation of independence and autonomy tends to be reinterpreted when confronted by the organisational capacity of mutual aid (Adams, 2011).

Methods

This paper uses data gathered between 2006 and 2008 from semi-structured interviews with a range of VSC stakeholders in one local authority in England. Stakeholders for this research were considered to be the key individuals who, in their professional capacity (and representing particular organisations), had a vested interest in the outcomes and outputs of VSCs. A purposive sample of 14 key stakeholders was chosen for interview, based upon each individual’s position in a particular organisation that has an expectation or set expectations concerning what a VSC can produce in light of wider policy considerations. Accordingly, respondents were selected on the basis of their ‘typicality’, allowing a sample to be built up that enabled the researcher to satisfy their specific needs (Cohen et al., 2007). In other words, purposive sampling was strategically employed in an attempt to build up a strong association between the research questions and the sample itself (Bryman, 2012).

The research was designed to be proportionate to the five attributes of qualitative purposive sampling strategies identified by Curtis et al. (2000: 4). These can be summarised as follows: relevancy and precision; the generation of rich information; enhancing the generalisability of the findings; the production of believable explanations; and feasibility. Accordingly, individuals were chosen using a purposive sampling strategy designed to capture the views of individuals in a variety of hierarchical positions in organisations that had an expectation or set of expectations concerning what a VSC can produce in light of wider policy considerations. Three sports were chosen that represent (a) the national sport – football; (b) the team sport that has proven most successful in the past 10 years – rugby union; and (c) the number one participation sport in England – swimming.⁶ This aspect of the sampling strategy ensured and facilitated a strong association between the research questions and the sample itself (Bryman, 2012; Cohen et al., 2007). The latter three attributes informed the data collection: a series of 14 iterative, semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders (a full list of the individual interviewees and types of stakeholder organisations represented is given in Table 2) supported by analysis of relevant policy documents. Heeding Yin’s (2003) warning against the ‘literal use’ of documents, in this instance documents, such as national policy documents, governing body documents, local authority policy documents and VSC internal communications, were used to ‘corroborate and augment evidence’.

Table 2.

Types of stakeholder organisations and individual representatives.

Stakeholder interviewee role	Stakeholder organisation	Notes
Council leader	Hampshire County Council	This is a political role – the council leader is the elected leader of a local political party
Director	County Sport Partnership (CSP)	CSPs receive funding from Sport England – their main function is to increase sport participation
Sport Development Officer (SDO)	Local authority	SDOs tend to work at local level with a broad remit to increase sport participation
Club and Volunteer Development Officer	CSP	A specific role in the CSP to liaise with voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) to help them best support volunteers and develop the club
Sport Development Manager	CSP	A more general role working across a range of sport to develop the core work of the CSP
Regional Development Manager	Hampshire Rugby Football Union (RFU)	The manager will look to develop the game and partnerships that support rugby union within the region
Chief Leisure Officer (CLO)	Local authority	The CLO has a broad remit to develop leisure services within a local authority situated within Hampshire
Member	Regional Sports Board (RSB)	RSBs were the focus for developing partnerships in each region, developing
		Regional Plans for Sport, securing investment, and working with local partners to deliver sport
Regional Development Manager	Hampshire Football Association	The manager will look to develop the game and partnerships that support football within the region
Sport Development Manager (a) – club development	Sport England South East region	Sport England is the government agency responsible for developing community sport and is accountable to Parliament through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport
Sport Development Manager (b) – workforce capacity building	Sport England South East region	This officer has a remit that specifically covers volunteers working in VSCs across the region
Director of Heritage and Recreation	Hampshire County Council	This officer has responsibility across the county for these services.
Senior Education Officer (Sport)	Hampshire County Council	This officer has responsibility for all sport that occurs within schools that falls under physical education
Portfolio holder Heritage, Culture and Sport	Local authority	This is a political role – at district level the portfolio holder is responsible for the services within his/her portfolio

The semi-structured approach enabled this piece of explanatory research to couple standardisation of question areas with an unregimented hand to probe beyond the answers given. In this way, open-ended questions followed by prompting and probing allowed greater ‘latitude’ and encouraged interviewees to expand on points that were of interest to the researcher during the ensuing dialogue (May, 2001). Interview themes and indicative questions included the following.

Connections and networks – how do you choose those you work with and those you don’t?

Value of the club – how valuable are clubs to you?

Trust & community composition – what do you think VSCs contribute to their local neighbourhood?

Partnerships – what do you expect from your partnerships with VSCs?

Modernisation – do you consider VSCs to be organised effectively?

Following Lincoln and Guba (1985), validity was measured against four criteria. These were truth value, operationalised as credibility and equalling internal validity; applicability referring to transferability and equalling external validity; consistency referring to dependability and equalling reliability; and neutrality operationalised as confirmability and equalling objectivity. The analysis of data followed an explanation-building approach (Yin, 2003) and employed qualitative content analysis to deconstruct and interpret verbal and written text in both a systematic and relatively objective manner (Krippendorff, 2004; Silverman, 2005). As part of the desire to provide explanatory interpretations, the qualitative content analysis followed an inductive logic that involved operationalising the research proposition, theoretical background and research questions and then iteratively revising processes as the interviews progress, gradually allowing broadly consensual themes to emerge from the nature of the enquiry (Gomm, 2004; Titscher et al., 2000). Credibility for this research comes from the triangulation of data from interviews, official documents and unsolicited documents, and respondent validation through the feedback of interview transcripts to individual participants. The nature of the iterative approach taken further attended to the research process by ensuring, as Wacquant suggests, ‘equal epistemic attention to all operations’ (1998: 219), as well as securing the researcher’s fidelity to real life (Cohen et al., 2007).

Findings – making sense of strategic orientations to forming social capital among voluntary sport club stakeholders

The next section examines the extent to which there exists a strategic orientation to use voluntary sports clubs to form social capital. In particular, this section considers how social capital theory can illuminate the interpretations of key stakeholders of the outputs and outcomes of VSCs. This framework allows a range of issues to be examined that relate to the direction, organisation and nature of policy interpretation which, in turn, focuses attention onto the role of social capital in promoting voluntary sports clubs as agents of social policy.

Stakeholders, social capital and micro policy contexts

In detecting a strategic orientation towards forming social capital at club level, the modernisation narrative tended to be interpreted by external stakeholders as club accreditation.⁷ As a reflexive process observable in the extent to which the product matches the process, club accreditation has a number of potential strategic and structural implications for the creation and generation of social capital in practices that are both simultaneous and ordered. A common theme of respondents representing nationally or regionally significant sport organisations was the overriding importance of modernisation as a process-oriented tool that centred on the need to ‘encourage’ clubs to be the ones that ‘experience’ and ‘undertake’ modernisation. None put it more forcefully than the Director of the County Sport Partnership (CSP):

So there is no misunderstanding, club accreditation is the most important thing for the national governing bodies, for the national organisations, for the county sports partnerships and also down to your local level, down to your districts and so on.

Other senior respondents referred to clubs ‘coming on board’ (Sport Development Officer); ‘focussing in’ on clubs that have been ‘identified’ (CSP Club and Volunteer Development Officer), ‘adapting the way they [VSCs] deliver’ (CSP Sport Development Manager) and there being some ‘buy-in by the clubs’ (RFU Regional Development Manager).

The language used not only indicated the existence of a clear agenda, but also that sports agencies increasingly have had to adopt NPM in the form of a trickle-down effect. For the objects of this agenda (VSCs), the strategic and structural reality, as conveyed by stakeholders, was viewed as survival via the necessary adoption of partnerships and best business practise (Green and Houlihan, 2006). For one Chief Leisure Officer it was a case of

…those clubs that are progressive and going to embrace change and do things in a way that the Government, Sport England and the local authorities want them to do, they are going to be the clubs that are going to thrive.

Indeed, stakeholders tended to use the rhetorical power of modernisation (Fairclough, 2006; Finlayson, 2003) in a discursively iterative fashion to reinforce the concrete and governance function of modernisation. Comments such as ‘forward thinking’, ‘proactive’, ‘development minded’ and ‘enlightened’ were considered appropriate by some senior stakeholders to describe those VSCs thought to be open to the accreditation process and working in partnership with a range of sporting agencies. The emphasis on partnership and networking across a range of social divisions can be seen as a clear signal of the strategic emphasis implicit within a policy landscape shaped by political concerns for ‘mixed economies of welfare’ (Giddens, 1998, 2000). This has at least three consequences that are important for a consideration of a strategic social capital position, to which respondents referred: firstly VSCs were encouraged to look to external agencies as partnership working becomes critical in the ‘mixed economy’, so that as the Sport Development Officer noted:

…it [accreditation] will encourage a club to make links with its local authority, sports development unit and all the sports clubs partnerships…[and] will start to encourage a club to look outwards rather than just being totally internally focused.

Secondly, support for VSCs becomes a structural necessity in establishing an appropriate ‘institutionally thick arena’ (Imrie and Raco, 2003), within which ‘service level agreements’ at the NGB/CSP level established ‘funding as a sort of carrot’ (CSP Club and Volunteer Development Officer), thereby tying VSCs in to broader strategic aims and objectives of upper-tier organisations. Thirdly, in conjunction with the drive for partnerships, networking was viewed positively, across a broad range of stakeholders, as both a means to an end and as a modus operandi commensurate with an expected modernised approach. For a Regional Sports Board member, this meant encouraging all VSCs:

…to go outside the box and do different things, link in with different partners because it is a great way for them developing as a club or getting funding and being able to support themselves.

Whilst the Football Association Regional Development Manager was more prosaic in clarifying the potential for change offered by this process; ‘the challenge is trying to get clubs to think outside their own structure’.

The continual focus on partnerships and networking certainly not only reflects Grix’s concern that the application of British sport policy involves a ‘bewildering array of actors’ (2009: 34), but arguably becomes self-serving in legitimising those agencies and actors involved in the policy process in the first place. Moreover, this approach further entrenches the enabling role of government and other national and regional organisations within an outsourcing culture that embraces the practices of the corporate world. It is this condition that arguably resonates with the dominant democratic strain of social capital in terms of promoting the importance of ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter, 1973) and/or ‘bridging capital’ (Putnam, 2000) as desirable outcomes. Across the entire stakeholder population sampled, the drive for VSCs to work within a web of increasingly complex partnerships within a strategically directed framework brought to the fore two related issues. First was the apparent absorption of VSCs into a ‘system’ of delivery (Sport England, 2007), without any real regard for what might be described as the culture or ‘lifeworld’ (Van Manen, 1990) of VSCs. Second was the constant referral to clubs as ‘delivery agents’ by the majority of stakeholders, not only reflecting the strength and legitimacy of Sport England’s, and hence central government’s, use of the drive to increase sport participation as a policy tool, but also potentially serving to discriminate against clubs who did not willingly comply. In short, this was often viewed as the development of ‘a good quality club’, which according to Sport England, Sport Development Manager (a), could be determined by whether the club has

…child protection and equity policies in place, have they got good quality coaches and coaching systems, have they got a robust sports development plan? Do they know where they want to be going to? Have they got robust monitoring and evaluation figures in place, do they know at any time what the mix of participants within their club is, in comparison to what the local demographics are as well?

The concerns of stakeholders thus reveal an emphasis on strategic utilitarianism, where the application of policy reflects the ‘what works’ philosophy and indicates the extent to which NPM has become integral to political and policy-orientated strategic frameworks. In this respect, much of the concern of stakeholders was focused on customers rather than citizens and the provision of public services (Evans, 2009), which increasingly included sport provision via third-sector partners (predominately VSCs) (Green, 2008; Green and Houlihan, 2006). For the Director of Heritage and Recreation of the county council, a utilitarian approach to social policy facilitated both service provision and support as a raison d’être of what a council ‘does’: ‘One intervention which saves “Jonathon” means the taxpayers aren’t paying £300 000 a year…if you can stop the spend in a sense…there is less of a strain on the taxpayer’. In this regard, the strategic policy drive to form social capital evidenced by stakeholders thus far is entirely reliant, as might be expected, on the dominant Putnam-inspired version that underpins the value of social benefit, increased trust, reciprocity and normative connectedness as valued and valuable outcomes. However, an emphasis on utility and a disregard for the impact on the instruments of policy themselves further underscores Marsh’s comment that ‘hierarchy…remains the dominant mode of governance’ (Marsh, 2008: 257). For social capitalists, the problematics of policy implementation become exacerbated when considering some of the organisational inequalities implicit in the exercising of mutual aid through voluntary organisations. The Senior Education Officer (Sport), on this matter, was clear how misappropriation of VSC voluntarism could be problematic:

…they [VSCs] don’t serve necessarily, because the very nature of the voluntary club is a group of people who got together to do tiddlywinks, because they wanted to do tiddlywinks, not because they suddenly woke up one morning and had a road to Damascus experience and thought: We must provide tiddlywinks for this community.

Metaphors, policy and the strategic promotion of social capital

The apparent increase in government influence over sport policy development (Oakley and Green, 2001) has ensured that social capital outcomes have been interwoven into strategic hierarchical frameworks. Indeed, it is apparent that aspects of resource dependency (Evans, 2009) are crucial to policy-making and implementation in the sport domain, so much so that under the rubric of social investment (Green, 2008), Grix and Phillpots have argued that ‘Government-led agendas frame sport policy, rather than the longer-term interests and development of specific sports…’ (2010: 7). Certainly, sport is included within the quality-of-life metaphor because of its perceived benefit to the collective, particularly as the democratic strain has also employed a variety of indices (Casey, 2004; Fukuyama, 1995, 2000; Narayan and Pritchett, 1999; Putnam 1996, 2000) and models (Paxton, 1999; Whiteley, 1999) in order to establish some form of measurement over the increasing claims for social capital’s efficacy in resolving social problems. The allusion to quality of life is interesting in that it presents a metaphor that has intuitive value for accepting the value and potential contribution of networked sport opportunities. Certainly, the County’s cultural strategy, Enjoying Hampshire, is clear that culture and sport can be seen as politically useable resources or public goods in the instrumental achievement of, or contribution to, a local authority’s wider objectives. It is in this context that the Council Leader argued

…we are charged by government with the wellbeing of the people of Hampshire and by well being is meant moving towards prevention rather than the cure…and in all of this sports as part of our culture, sports play a very, very important role [original emphasis].

Thus, the important, some may say vital, contribution of sport participation through VSCs in increasing the prevalence of social capital outcomes in a community – trust, mutuality, reciprocity and the production of norms and values – impact directly on the quality of life of that community. The comments and documentation seemingly reflect the concerns of the democratic strain of social capital and echo former Home Secretary David Blunkett’s view that social capital provides not only ‘…concrete empirical and theoretical content to ideas about community networks…[but ensures that] communities suffer less crime, anti-social behaviour and family breakdown, when people know and trust each other, and interact in clubs, associations and voluntary groups’ (Blunkett, 2003: 26–27).

In a series of documents collectively produced by Sport England entitled Sport Playing its Part, the ‘usual suspects’ associated with sports participation, such as self-esteem, confidence and enjoyment, were cited. However, more tellingly, these documents referred to the role of sport in ‘enriching people’s quality of life’ (Sport England, 2006). It is clear that at the policy-making level of this county council, sport participation was viewed in this rather prosaic and functionalist manner consistent with the dominant macro-level policy context. Again, the Council Leader was able to identify a perceptible strategic value:

I start from the base that sports, for me are vital, they are vital in the sense that they are character forming for the young. They are vital in the sense that they are an aid to better health. They are vital in our schools too, and I know there is a debate about it, to inculcate into our children in a pleasant way, a competitive element, because life is competitive. Life is part of striving and sport helps that.

Within this statement one can detect the sort of normalising and moralistic outlook necessary for the promotion of sport and, hence, VSCs within and as part of broader structural processes, which tends to suggest that sport was viewed as a social panacea. Given New Labour’s functionalism (Prideaux, 2005), it is not surprising that this perception would be in line with central government thinking, thereby making sport an appropriate area for intervention. In a similar fashion, another elected politician, the portfolio holder for Heritage, Culture and Sport, argued that the value of a sports club was ‘…almost immeasurable’:

We cannot know, I don’t think we can really know or fully appreciate the impact a sport might have on a young person’s life. It can help solve all kinds of problems, it can help solve emotional problems, it can help solve physical problems.

Notwithstanding the problematic issue of measurement and direction of causality referred to by this respondent, it is again the combination of virtuous complacency and utilitarian value that are the dominant qualities assumed by someone in a policy-making position.

Evident in the above comments, and those of the Director of Heritage and Recreation that ‘…if communities want to organise things and do things for themselves, the County Council has a role in supporting that…’, is that, firstly, sport is viewed primarily in social policy terms, secondly, the council rhetorically seeks to have an enabling role based on bottom-up led activity and, thirdly, the ‘core policy paradigms’ of New Labour (Houlihan and White, 2002) – namely pragmatism, community and modernisation (Green, 2008; Houlihan and Green, 2009) – indeed came to frame sport policy during this period. Furthermore, the introduction of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) for all local authorities from 2003 (Audit Commission, 2009) also reinforced the underlying NPM ethos of the modernisation agenda by assessing a range of performance criteria to measure quality of life. In doing so, the CPA also reinforced those methodologies that favoured the establishment of causality using quantitative measures, which was in tune with the dominant approach employed by proponents of the democratic strain of social capital in measuring its formation and prevalence in the first place.

Certainly, the notion of quality of life translates to a further ‘politically useable resource’ (Allison, 1986), which in resonating with democratic social capital remains suitably vague, augmenting and feeding the prevailing audit culture of a modernised system. Certainly, the metaphor of quality of life is as much about counteracting the over-individualised and de-socialised approach (Pattie et al., 2004) of NPM as it is a key tactic in the development of norms and values that cohere within and amongst communities. Consequently, democratic social capital-infused social policy predicated on voluntary activity has been a key factor in establishing such normative connectivity, which for the council leader meant

…our social policy is that the County Council take the view that by supporting voluntary sports clubs or voluntary activity anyway is good for the quality of life for the County, across all disciplines.

Clearly, the role of sport in developing one’s perceived quality of life is not a new phenomenon; ‘sport for all’ in the 1970s was not only an attempt to ameliorate peoples’ lives, but was moreover a continuation of the dominant welfaristic and Keynesian approach to promoting social policy through sport (Green, 2006; Houlihan and White, 2002). The structural emphasis on accessing funding to articulate the relationship between sports organisations and the addressing of broad social ‘problems’ was clearly identified in successive government policies from 2000 onwards. A Sporting Future for All, for example, published in 2000, centred on modernising sporting structures in the UK in line with government ‘social investment’ strategies (Green, 2008: 4) and identified the ‘…need for more systematic and structured development of sports clubs across the country’ (DCMS, 2000: 40). Moreover, Game Plan (2002) specifically referred to the use of sport in the community ‘to build social capital’ (p.60), and since this seminal document the Carter Report (2005), The Delivery System (2007) and Sport England’s Strategy 2008-2011 have each attributed greater control over the public funding voluntary sport organisations receive in return for the one-stop shop notion of eliminating duplication and increasing co-ordination, whilst accepting government steerage in meeting government objectives. For the Director of the County Sports Partnership, the networking and modernisation of VSCs is a win–win situation which brings ‘…all the health benefits, that feeling of well being…a social element…In some cases a sense of belonging, [as well as]…positive images of young people engaged in really positive activities…’ In short, at all levels of the policy cascade, sport and VSCs were evidenced as being ‘self evidently a good thing’ (Rowe, 2005).

Conclusions

This paper has outlined and examined the existence of a strategic orientation to promote social capital within UK policy frameworks and has used a case study of experiences in one English county to highlight this. In outlining the political and policy context within England, the paper has outlined the impact of modernisation and a move to network governance on strategic orientations to deliver social capital outcomes within the sports policy domain. One of the key conclusions of this research is that the encouragement of sport participation is bound up in a modernised and modernising social capitalistic framework. This is because it is predominantly delivered via VSCs. In succumbing to the demands of evidence-based policy (Sanderson, 2002; Solesbury, 2001), the drive for functionalistic policy has tended to incorporate democratic social capital as a way of incorporating community-level outcomes from individual participation. Under the guise of modernisation, other strains of social capital have largely been excluded from policy-making approaches. It is in this respect that the tenets of NPM provide the theoretical clarity to observe VSC stakeholders as accepting of, or willingly complying with, a culture of audit, targets and performance management. Consequently, sport-specific modernisation processes (club accreditation) can be viewed as the transfer of strategy to structure with the emphasis laid upon partnerships and networks crucial for taking VSCs out of their own perceived insularity.

The adoption of this process consequently produces the necessary evidence for substantiating claims made for the democratic strain of social capital. Indeed, the evidence suggests that, although a fuzzy concept, quality of life is useful as a politically usable resource. This ‘fuzziness’ has a rather imprecise quality that allows policymakers to rhetorically support VSCs almost unconditionally. Consequently, many of the stakeholders questioned were able to argue that the mere presence of a VSC in an area was indicative of the civic strength of that area, reinforcing the apparent virtuousness of VSCs as well as signifying the necessity for their incorporation into the architecture of delivery.

It is clear that, for some, social capital and its formation through sport organisations is seen as the big idea (Evans, 2009); however, the manner and logic of its incorporation into sport and social policy calls into question whether there is a big idea at all. An important consequence of the apparent strategic policy thrust towards forming democratic social capital outcomes is the apparent acceptance of a hazy logic that insists on societal-level outcomes from individual activity. Indeed, much of what has been written concerning sport and social capital is both under-theorised and lacking in contextual resonance. The unambiguous inference of the preceding analysis is that contextual issues – in particular organisational and institutional structure – need to be attended more readily in order to capitalise on those opportunity structures framing policy-making processes in the sport-policy domain. The structure and function of voluntary organisations – mutual aid and, hence, power, control and autonomy – are crucial issues that are often ignored by policy makers in favour of a more rational approach where modernising concerns have dominated. These concerns have ramifications for how social capital and sport can be interpreted, treated and examined in a variety of global contexts, and lays bare those analyses that privilege agency over structure. Given the continued international interest and emphasis in the social value of voluntary activity and associationalism, there is a clear need for greater evidence from micro-level analyses concerning social capital and policy implementation. Furthermore, although commentators have remarked on the dark side of social capital (Blackshaw and Long, 2005; Field, 2003; Lewandowski, 2006; Portes and Landolt, 1996; Putnam, 2000), there is little of this discussion that has been applied to sport. There is then a clear need for further research to consider social capital more critically in light of policy-orientated demands to develop social capital as an aid to strengthening the social world of humans. This would of course would necessitate a ‘…series of intensive community based studies which start with a very limited number of hypotheses about the nature, characteristics and consequences of social capital which can then be tested through in-depth, predominately qualitative, community based research’ (Johnston and Percy-Smith, 2003: 331).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ian Jones for comments on an early draft of this paper and the reviewers for their useful comments.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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