As Andrew Leigh notes in his new book, Disconnected, the concept of social capital is relatively simple: it refers to ‘networks of trust and reciprocity that link multiple individuals together’. But its measurement is more complex and has been the source of considerable debate and criticism. Some critics of the ‘decline thesis’ argue that people have simply moved away from the traditional social activities, clubs, and societies that Putnam analysed, and have taken up new ones, such as online communities and activities. But one of Putnam’s virtues as a thinker has been his willingness to consider, and his capacity to counter, the criticisms and complaints through subtle analysis of data and a powerful sociological imagination. Indeed, the expansion of his initial ideas in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) was an impressive and detailed rendering of his provocative thesis. The broad conclusion has been that, at least throughout the Western world, social capital has been in decline.

Australia, unlike the United States, has not systematically collected data on social capital, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics noted in the early 2000s. Leigh has been collecting his own data on social capital over the last ten years, and in Disconnected he collates it and ponders its meaning. Disconnected is written in a clear, sometimes folksy voice. Leigh spares his readers the intricacies of some of the statistical analyses, instead highlighting the main findings, and the conclusions that we might draw from them.

Unsurprisingly, and according to a whole raft of measures, Leigh finds that social capital has declined in Australia. Australians are less likely to join clubs, unions, and political parties than in the past, and when they do they are less active as members; they are less inclined to volunteer and to give to charity; they go to church less; they mix less with their neighbours and have fewer friends. Though they might still attend sport in large numbers, as in the past, they are less likely to play an organised sport. They attend fewer cultural events. The material on trust in politicians, interest in and knowledge of politics, political and civic activism, and voter turnout is more equivocal and harder to interpret, as political scientist Murray Goot has shown in his studies of polling, but Leigh nevertheless reads the evidence as supporting a decline in the general health of Australian democracy.

One reassuring finding is that Australians are not less trustworthy and honest now than they have been in the recent past, nor are they more prone to corruption and crime (the latter despite what the tabloids, and some unscrupulous politicians, say). Leigh marshals the main evidence gathered on trust in various surveys over the last three decades. When asked ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?’, about half the population says that most people can be trusted. This has not changed much since the early 1980s, when the ‘trust’ questions were first asked. Here is one area where the data does not suggest a decline in social capital. Australia stands in contrast to the United States in this respect; Putnam has shown that Americans have become less trusting and that the decline is continuing. Trust is important, Leigh comments, because ‘How we regard others is actually a clue to how we behave ourselves.’ People who are more trusting also seem to be more trustworthy. Interpersonal trust is related to social trust, trust in politicians and institutions, and more trusting organisations and societies tend to function better. But although trust has not recently declined in Australia, this is not a cause for celebration. Australians are still much less trusting than Scandinavians, and we have a relatively high rate of violent crime among Western countries.

One of the controversial ideas that Leigh addresses, and that has also been addressed by Putnam, is the negative relationship between racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in our neighbourhoods, suburbs, and organisations, and people’s trust of one another, their willingness to join in collective action, and their preparedness to support collective causes like social welfare. Leigh has published these claims in earlier papers, and they were reported on at the time in the major broadsheets, sometimes as arguments against multiculturalism. What should be noted is that this is not an argument against ethnic diversity, immigration, or multiculturalism. Like Putnam, Leigh believes that the future of our affluent Western societies depends upon immigrant renewal, and that diversity also has its great, long-term benefits for societies. Nevertheless, he shows unequivocally that diverse communities tend to produce less social trust. We need to know this, and as policy makers, citizens, and local activists we need to be alert to the dangers, and creative in our attempts at ameliorating the drawbacks of diversity, including what Putnam and, following him, Leigh call the tendency for individuals to ‘hunker down’.

The least successful, and I think the oddest part of the book, is the conclusion ‘What Is To Be Done?’, in which Leigh suggests ten ways to improve social capital. These include smiling when you pass people in the street, organising street parties in your own neighbourhood, asking people from work to share lunch with you, donating to charities, revitalising the organisations to which you belong, reclaiming the footpaths, taking up a new social activity, and so on. This highlights one of the difficulties I have often had with the social capital literature. After emphasising the larger social structural causes for the decline of social capital – Leigh lists ‘long working hours, the feminisation of the workplace, car commuting, television, diversity, impersonal technology and tipping points’ – it is to be rectified by our becoming better people: better joiners, better participators, friendlier to our neighbours, and so on. In other words, Leigh provides voluntaristic solutions to social problems, and his book concludes with the upbeat sentence: ‘Renewing Australia’s social capital is as straightforward as it is important – and it starts with you.’

People who live in Australia’s larger capital cities might also bristle when Leigh extols the virtues of carefully planned urban environments such as Canberra (apparently the social capital capital) as a model to be followed elsewhere for improving social capital; they might see the greater excitement, diversity, and even messiness of their cities as the great attractions of the urban experience.

In the end, it is not clear how worried we should be about the so-called decline in social capital, in Australia or elsewhere. In Disconnected, Leigh has not produced an Australian Bowling Alone;unlike the latter,in my view he expends surprisingly little energy analysing the meanings and nuances of his findings. Nevertheless, it is a good start.