Social Networks, Political Institutions and Rural Societies (Rural History in Europe) (Rural History in Europe, 11) 9782503548043, 2503548040

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Rural History in Europe 11

COST Action A 35 PROGRESSORE

COST – the acronym for European COoperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research – is the oldest and widest European intergovernmental network for cooperation in research. Established by the Ministerial Conference in November 1971, COST is presently used by the scientific communities of 35 European countries to cooperate in common research projects supported by national funds. The funds provided by COST – less than 1% of the total value of the projects – support the COST cooperation networks (COST Actions) through which, with EUR 30 million per year, more than 30,000 European scientists are involved in research having a total value which exceeds EUR 2 billion per year. This is the financial worth of the European added value which COST achieves. A ‘bottom up approach’ (the initiative of launching a COST Action comes from the European scientists themselves), à la carte participation (only countries interested in the Action participate), ‘equality of access’ (participation is open also to the scientific communities of countries not belonging to the European Union) and ‘flexible structure’ (easy implementation and light management of the research initiatives) are the main characteristics of COST (Web: www.cost.esf.org). As precursor of advanced multidisciplinary research COST has a very important role for the realisation of the European Research Area (ERA) anticipating and complementing the activities of the Framework Programmes, constituting a ‘bridge’ towards the scientific communities of emerging countries, increasing the mobility of researchers across Europe and fostering the establishment of ‘Networks of Excellence’ in many key scientific domains such as: Biomedicine and Molecular Biosciences; Food and Agriculture; Forests, their Products and Services; Materials, Physical and Nanosciences; Chemistry and Molecular Sciences and Technologies; Earth System Science and Environmental Management; Information and Communication Technologies; Transport and Urban Development; Individuals, Societies, Cultures and Health. It covers basic and more applied research and also addresses issues of pre normative nature or of societal importance.

Social Networks, Political Institutions, and Rural Societies Edited by Georg Fertig

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EDITORIAL BOARD Gérard Béaur, director Bas van Bavel Rosa Congost Anne Lise Head-König Socrates Petmezas Vicente Pinilla Jürgen Schlumbohm

This publication is supported by COST. It is the result of the work launched in the working Group 4, ‘State and Rural Societies’ of the COST Action A35 PROGRESSORE. It came into existence thanks to the funding of both the ESF (COST), the Centre de Recherches Historiques (CNRS-EHESS) UMR8558 and the GDR (Groupe de Recherches of the CNRS) 2912, Histoire des Campagnes Européennes. We are grateful to Anne Varet-Vitu (umr 8558, ehess-cnrs) who created the final lay-out of the book and Thomas Hajduk, Johanna Riese, and Emily Sanford who prepared the manuscript for publication. Cover: Wilhelm Leibl, Die Dorfpolitiker, 1877, Museum Oskar Reinhart, The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. © D/ 2015/0095/75 ISBN 978-2-503-54804-3 Printed on acid free paper © 2015 Brepols Publisher n.v., Turnhout, Belgium and COST All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

CONTENTS List of Contributors List of Figures List of Tables

The Series Rural History in Europe

1. Rural history and the analysis of social relations Georg Fertig

2. The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes: First evidence from farm surveys in Central and Eastern Europe Axel Wolz & Jana Fritzsch 3. Social capital in Armenia Milada Kasarjyan & Gertrud Buchenrieder

4. Unmarried adolescents and filial assistance in eighteenth-century rural Flanders Thijs Lambrecht

5. Life course strategies, social networks, and market participation in nineteenth-century rural Westphalia: An interpretative essay Ulrich Pfister, Johannes Bracht, Christine Fertig & Georg Fertig

6. Land at risk: Distribution of common land between networks and elites in nineteenth century Veneto Cristina Munno

7. Closing a network: A tale of not-so-common lands (Nonantola, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) Guido Alfani 8. Actor-networks, credit markets and the Nazi state: Monetary relations in Austrian rural societies, 1938-1945 Ernst Langthaler

9. Changing forms of cooperation in persistent peasant networks. The case of the Mühlviertler Alm, Austria Gertraud Seiser

10. Family affairs? Kinship, social networks and political mobilisation in an Alpine village, 1840-1900 Sandro Guzzi-Heeb

7 8 9 11 13

31 49

63 89

125

153 183 211

235

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11. Finding a match: Credit, co-operatives and local societies in Hungary around 1900. A preliminary report András Vári 12. Formal network methods in history: Why and how? Claire Lemercier

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257 281

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Guido Alfani Johannes Bracht Gertrud Buchenrieder Christine Fertig Georg Fertig Jana Fritzsch Sandro Guzzi-Heeb Milada Kasarjyan Thijs Lambrecht Ernst Langthaler Claire Lemercier Cristina Munno Ulrich Pfister Gertrud Seiser András Vári (†) Axel Wolz

Bocconi University Milan, Italy

Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg Halle (Saale) Germany Technical University Munich, Germany University of Münster, Germany

Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg Halle (Saale), Germany

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) Leipzig, Germany Universities of Berne and Lausanne, Switzerland

Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg Halle (Saale), Germany Ghent University, Belgium

Institute of Rural History St. Pölten, Austria

CSO, Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CNRS-Sciences Po) Paris, France Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium University of Münster, Germany University of Vienna, Austria

University of Miskolc, Hungary

Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO) Halle (Saale), Germany

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. Figure 2.1. Figure 3.1. Figure 4.1. Figure 5.1. Figure 5.2. Figure 5.3. Figure 6.1. Figure 6.2. Figure 6.3. Figure 7.1. Figure 7.2. Figure 7.3. Figure 7.4. Figure 7.5. Figure 7.6. Figure 8.1. Figure 8.2. Figure 8.3. Figure 8.4. Figure 8.5. Figure 8.6. Figure 8.7. Figure 8.8.

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Overview of regions and places discussed in this volume Model (left side) and used variables (right side) Intensity of intra-group relations, in descending order by actor Ratio of land prices and wages of servants in Flanders, 1710-1795 Geographical setting of the study (borders from 1815) Actors and entitlements regulated in property transfer contracts Strong components of marriage networks in Löhne, marriages 1750-1874 Godparental choices in Follina by social milieu, 1834-1888 Kinship network (December 1850) and families involved in the auction of the common land Godparental network (December 1850) and families involved in the auction Percentage of members of the Living Mouth marrying other members of the Living Mouth Choice of godparents within the Living Mouth Choice of marriage witnesses within the Living Mouth Social endogamy in Nonantola, 1714-1800 (five-term moving averages) Living Mouth endogamic marriages and number of Living Mouth spouses on total, 1714-1800 (5-term moving average) Choice of partners, marriage witnesses and godfathers within the Living Mouth, 1796-1800 Heuristic framework Diffusion curves of ‘debt relief’ applications in Frankenfels, Heidenreichstein and Auersthal, 1938-1939 Diffusion of ‘debt relief’ applications in Frankenfels (complex graph) Diffusion of ‘debt relief’ applications in Frankenfels (simplified graph) Diffusion of ‘debt relief’ applications in Heidenreichstein (complex graph) Diffusion of ‘debt relief’ applications in Heidenreichstein (simplified graph) Diffusion of ‘debt relief’ applications in Auersthal (complex graph) Diffusion of ‘debt relief’ applications in Auersthal (simplified graph)

LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1. Table 2.2. Table 2.3. Table 3.1. Table 3.2. Table 3.3. Table 3.4. Table 3.5. Table 4.1. Table 4.2. Table 4.3. Table 4.4. Table 6.1. Table 6.2. Table 6.3. Table 6.4. Table 6.5. Table 6.6. Table 6.7. Table 7.1. Table 7.2. Table 7.3. Table 7.4. Table 7.5. Table 7.6. Table 8.1. Table 8.2. Table 8.3. Table 8.4. Table 8.5. Table 10.1. Table 10.2.

Main indicators of the four IAMO social capital surveys Main results of the factor analysis of four IAMO social capital surveys Results of the multiple regression analysis of a survey among corporate farm managers in the Czech Republic Densities of communication, labour, lending, and family relationship Association between the networks by QAP correlation Crosstabulation of absolute numbers of ties, based on multiple ties Crosstabulation of absolute numbers of ties, based on reciprocal ties Family ties and reciprocity Shares of remuneration of farm servants in Eastern Flanders, c. 1810-1815 Saving rates of farm servants in Flanders, 1711-1779 Benefits in kind for servants and their parents: Lembeke, 1786-1800 Size of agricultural holdings in Markegem, 1742-1846 Average values of social network indicators, by social class Percentage land distribution in 1848, by owner category and type of land use Land distribution in Follina, 1848, private citizens by strata Land distribution in 1851, by rural category and type of land use Land ownership and auction participation, by social class Some social network measures involved (godparental network) Logistic regression of auction participation (all cases and Follina) Male and female endogamy within the Living Mouth Territorial and social endogamy in Nonantola Choice of godparents in Nonantola Choice of marriage witnesses in Nonantola Concentration of godfathers and marriage witnesses, 1587-1596 Most frequently chosen godfathers and marriage witnesses Application rates in Frankenfels, Heidenreichstein and Auersthal, 1938 Multifunctional personal relations of the applicants in Frankenfels, Heidenreichstein and Auersthal, 1938 Socioeconomic features according to applicant classes, 1938 Sorts of debts according to applicant classes, 1938 Evaluation of applicants by agronomic experts, 1938-1945 Kinship relations of 146 ‘clan’ wives to the ‘clan’, 1840s Closest kinship relation between the wives of Radical men and other members of the Radical faction

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Table 10.3. Table 11.1. Table 11.2. Table 11.3. Table 11.4.

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Closest kinship relation between the wives of Radical men and other women of the Radical ‘clan’ Pest County population by religion and native language, around 1900 Structure of landholding in County Pest, c. 1890 Shareholders of Pest County Credit Co-operative at the end of 1886 The local initiators of founding credit co-ops in Pest County

The Series Rural History in Europe Sometimes viewed as the producer of foodstuffs and raw materials, as a garden or a space for the production of energy; sometimes seen as a reservoir of manpower destined to be subverted to the needs of cities and industries or as a peaceful haven which welcomes weary city-dwellers; also regarded as a place of easily-incensed ‘backward’ societies or as an idyllic spot, close to nature where societies act as guardians of a certain conception of quality of life, the countryside has not ceased to be at the centre of economic, social, political, and now environmental concern of governments and public opinion. Pulled between contradictory demands, the countryside of today presents an image of a place and a society in clear transformation, which, in itself, is difficult to decipher. In Europe, the difficulty is that the countryside, which forms a complex and evolving universe, is experiencing ruptures and also exhibits inertias. These complex transformations of the rural world can only be fully understood if they are viewed in a manner which transcends national boundaries and if the discrepancies, which can only be observed by adopting a broad view, in fact at the continental scale, are taken into account. These changes cannot be explained without reference to their past. The question is how to create such a dialogue between researchers which goes beyond national boundaries, crosses chronological barriers and breaks disciplinary boundaries. The main objective of the ‘Rural History in Europe’ collection is to provide just such keys to unlock the changes experienced by present-day European rural societies in the light of their historical experience. It is to produce the historical knowledge which will allow us to conceptualise the future of European country-dwellers, as they face the kinds of problems which historians have grappled with in examining societies in the past: under-employment and multiple occupations, migrations and rural depopulation, distortion of competition by the marketplace or by the policies established by political authorities, competition with non-European producers, problems of resource allocation (land and water), distribution and redistribution of heritages and land-holding, the future of owner-occupied farms and the function of agriculture as employer, the tensions between private ownership and public access to land, the changes induced by settlement of urban migrants, environment and sustainable development, and so on. In most European countries, rural society and long term change have been the subject of intensive research. Over the last half-century, a lively historiography has developed around questions concerning the factors of growth and systems of agricultural production, as well as the periodisation of growth and the impact of agriculture on industrial development. As a result, a body of knowledge has built up on techniques, forms of land-use, levels of production, the differing conditions and nature of the peasantry and the strategies of economic agents. More recently

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environmental concerns have made a dramatic impact on the consciousness of historians in the field, while previous findings have been questioned in a critical way and new perspectives have been drawn. The field known as Rural History remains very much alive, despite the decline of the agricultural sector over the last several decades. Rural History remains fundamental in a Europe which has for so long been kept together by its Common Agricultural Policy and which now has to face the heavy impact of Brussels-based initiatives upon its rural regions, and an unprecedented revision of current agrarian systems and systems of production in the countries which have recently joined the EU. How can the changes taking place in present-day Europe be understood without taking into account a past which is still very present, and which determines both structures and behaviour? The first volumes of this collection are the result of twelve workshops which have been held during three years (2006-2008) and which have mainly been supported by funds of the European Action COST A 35 and by other institutions like CORN, GDR CNRS Sociétés Rurales Européennes, Universities… The COST Action intends to extend the historical analysis of rural society over the last millenium in order to envisage the problems of the countryside in an extended timeframe and also to draw upon the commentary and expertise of specialists from other disciplines (sociology, economics, anthropology). This will enable the first real comparison of Europe from historians from all over the continent, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from the western frontier to the eastern limits. Papers from these meetings will be published after a peer-review process, supported by the editorial board and, of course, the work of the authors and editors of the volumes. This collection will be constructed upon four main pillars: Landed property; The management of rural land; Peasant societies; The state, government, politics and peasants. Each of these will bring new perspectives and produce new tools to better understand the changes which are taking place today. In order to ask the relevant questions about the future of these peasantries and rural spaces in transformation, the books of this collection will deal with the longue durée and will present either research in progress or a synthesis on a regional or national scale. The cumulative effect of this approach will be to produce volumes, the geographical coverage of which will be the whole of Europe. The volumes will also, of course, take into account the role of history as an explanatory factor for contemporary European Societies. If rural societies have been overthrown, if rural landscapes have been profoundly transformed and if the intervention of the State has considerably strengthened the regulation of production and trade, the contrast between a contemporary rural world in rapid transformation and a traditional rural world with frozen landscapes, petrified societies, immobile economies and lethargic political contexts will be an illusion. It is important, therefore, to detect, to measure and to interpret the range of recent changes by illuminating those that have taken place in past centuries in a European context.

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1.



Rural history and the analysis of social relations

Georg Fertig

I.  Introduction This book is a compilation of papers on social networks, social capital, and kinship in historical and contemporary rural settings. It is one of a series of books that address the role of the state on the countryside. One of the books takes a national perspective, comparing countries and national bureaucracies in their approach to rural society, particularly their attempts to enhance education and agricultural production over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (Vivier, 2009). Another examines the effects of European cooperation (Moser & Varley, 2010). This book looks in the opposite direction. We examine structures that are political in effect because they deal with the problems politics must address: of creating an economically viable agriculture, of ensuring social control, or of mobilising local support for political agendas. Yet these structures are not part of the state. There are forms of cooperation or social relations on a micro level that are either not constructed or only marginally constructed by larger political entities, but that still matter for the bigger picture of long‑term development and modernisation pursued by modern states (Petmezas & Vivier, 2009: 12-17; Moser & Varley, 2010). Most of the papers were presented in 2007 at a meeting in Münster that focused on the limits and opportunities of state intervention, and concluded by emphasizing the importance of studying social networks1. Originally, a threefold perspective was taken. From the perspective of the state, it was asked why some policies are not carried out successfully. It was hypothesised, firstly, that local society often provided paths to 1   The conference was funded by the COST action A35 Progressore and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant 4851/31/07. It was also among the core activities of the DFG project ‘Relationships and Resource Flows in Rural Societies’ at the University of Münster, DFG grant PF 351/6, directed by Ulrich Pfister. Particular thanks are owed to Gérard Béaur for offering our research group the opportunity to collaborate with Progressore, to the commentators at the conference (David Sabean, Rui Santos, Michael Schnegg, and Nadine Vivier), as well as to the anonymous referees, two of which read the chapters of the book, and to Socrates Petmezas, who supervised the entire process. In various stages of manuscript preparation, Thomas Hajduk, Emily Sanford and Johanna Riese went through each chapter. The introduction reflects my very limited knowledge of social network analysis, kinship history, and social capital studies, which has been formed through continuous discussions with Christine Fertig, as well as through inspiring input from Claire Lemercier and Rui Santos.

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Rural history and the analysis of social relations

resources other than those encouraged by reforming and modernising states. While policies of agrarian reform typically relied on formal organisations and the creation of anonymous markets, peasant families often depended on informal networks. Secondly, networks can also provide possibilities for successful contacts between the state and local societies, particularly when local officeholders act as interpreters between popular and official discourses, or when they provide local populations with supra-local resources. In this sense, the very definitions of ‘peasant societies’ e.g. by Eric Wolf and Henri Mendras hinge on the relationship of peasant communities with wider structures such as markets and the state, explicitly through mediating roles in social networks (Wolf, 1966; Mendras, 1976). Thirdly, from the perspective of the peasant families, networks could have quite ambiguous effects, both as ‘social capital’ (in the words of Bourdieu, 1986), and as in-groups that insulated their members from the outside world. Figure 1.1. Overview of regions and places discussed in this volume

Note. Cartography: Katrin Moeller, based on ESRI ArcGIS, Global Imagery Shaded Relief Europe & Africa, 2001-2008.

II.  Social relations and academic fields of study The papers in this volume deal not only with different regions (as presented in Figure  1.1), but also with different time periods: Alfani and Lambrecht with the early modern period, Munno, Guzzi, Pfister et al. and Vári with the nineteenth century or earlier, Langthaler with an authoritarian society in the twentieth century, 14

Georg Fertig

and Kasarjyan & Buchenrieder, Wolz & Fritzsch, and Seiser with the present. More importantly, they are situated within a field structured by different and often antagonistic disciplines: ethnology, economics, (historical) sociology, and (social and economic) history. As a historian, I must admit that among these disciplines, history is the one that is the least unified in terms of methods and theories. Thus, historians’ work – in this book, as elsewhere – does not necessarily share the perspectives of Leopold von Ranke or Arnold Toynbee as much as those of Max Weber, Adam Smith, or Jack Goody. History, particularly social and economic history, is itself a blend of the disciplines found in this book, while simultaneously testing their limits and expanding their fields of application. Cooperative efforts such as the one that has led to this volume are thus the backbones of history. In terms of theory and methods, formal social network analysis – discussed elaborately by Lemercier – is explicitly used in about half of the papers. However the analysis of formal and informal social relations nevertheless unites all the chapters. They each examine some type of cooperation (or relations that entail a potential for cooperation, or for competition, or conflict) and discuss their conditions, construction, changes, or consequences. They do so in rural contexts, which often means that the state is not omnipresent, but in the making. This observation applies both to earlier historical periods and to transformation societies in the present day, when central bureaucratic structures have withdrawn and new structures – formal or informal – have taken their place. Thus, in essence this book is not about the state and rural society as much as it is about what exists or existed before, after, or in lieu of the state, and how such relationships were often influenced by the state, creating both obstacles and opportunities for the state. In their narrowest, most classical, and simplest variants, the disciplines of ethnology, economics, sociology and history have started out from radically divergent views of the forms of cooperation other than those organised by the state. In the nineteenth century, historicist historians made a distinction between the emergent modern states and the rural world, which was governed by traditional authorities and customs: ‘Der preußische Staat […] endete […] im Landrath’. That is, the Prussian state did not extend downwards below the institution of district administrators; local village authorities, institutions, or inhabitants are neither part of the state, nor are they ultimately conceivable as an object of historiography in this classical view2. This explains why historians have quite often displayed a tendency to plunder the concepts of other disciplines when trespassing into the no man’s land of rural or otherwise seemingly apolitical history.   Cf. von Meier (1881: 116). A cliché, which is untrue in terms of administrative history as early as the late eighteenth century, see Harnisch (1991: 311-12) and Oestreich (1968: 333).

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For a long time, classical and neoclassical economists have interpreted the cooperation of market participants as synonymous with collusion (Smith, 1776: ch. 10, para. 82). Conscious cooperation as the result of market mechanisms was unthinkable. Strands of economic theory that analyse non-market cooperation, such as institutional economics, having lost the early twentieth century Methodenstreit to what became the dominant neoclassical economics, were reborn with new theoretical sophistication during the last few decades and still shine with innovativeness, while social capital has rather recently been conceived as a production factor in its own right and network externalities have emerged as a key concept in innovation economics. Originally, what we study in this book has existed on the other side of the market from the perspective of economists, much in the same way as it has existed on the other side of the state for historians. In sociological modernisation theories, both the state and the market have originally been viewed as modern institutions that constitute ‘society’ – Tönnies’s (1887) Gesellschaft, Durkheim’s (1893) solidarité organique – as opposed to the premodern institutions that constitute community (Gemeinschaft, solidarité mécanique). Insofar as sociologists were interested in modernisation, they saw non-state, nonmarket forms of cooperation primarily in terms of their disappearance (and, indeed, as in Durkheim’s discussion of anomy, in terms of the problems such disappearance posed to the integration of society). However, an important strand of sociology dating back to Georg Simmel (the classical text being Simmel, 1908) has always constructed its object of interest to be patterns of social relations rather than of individual actors. Social network analysis is based on this tradition; it attempts to explain social order not by pointing to internalised models of action and to the interests, attitudes, and behavioural patterns of people with similar attributes, but by pointing to the positions of people relative to each other and the relationship patterns underlying such positions. Finally, ethnology has always claimed the no man’s land of the rural, the nonmarket, and the non-state as its own realm, be it in pre-modern societies or, more recently, as the interstitial fabric of modern ones. While important strands of social network analysis have been shaped by ethnologists over the last decades, classical ethnological concepts of cooperation are much older. This refers to kinship – a primordial topic in the study of exotic non-modern societies – assuming that ‘they’ live in a kinship world, while ‘we’ live in a modern, anonymous world. It also refers to the concept of generalized reciprocity, developed by Malinowski, theorised by Mauss, and introduced by Polanyi into the field of economic history (Malinowski, 1922; Mauss, 1924; Polanyi, 1944, 1957). Kinship and reciprocity are almost by definition long‑term concepts with a strong temporal dimension. The whole point of generalized reciprocity is that a gift should not be returned at the same time it is given,

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Georg Fertig

and kinship is a structure that connects people because other people were connected earlier (Bourdieu, 1972b). Kinship and reciprocity thus cut across synchronous research designs based on questionnaires or fieldwork, and have an obvious appeal to historians.

III.  Kinship, social capital, social networks, and family strategies Kinship, social capital, and social networks are overlapping yet distinct concepts used by the disciplines joined in this volume to deal with social relations. While they have diffused far beyond their original disciplines, the distinctions are still remarkable and they should not be confused. Kinship, to begin with, often carries ambivalent or negative meanings (such as the stereotyped stepmother in Western lore). From the perspective of kinship history, there is little reason to be euphoric about webs of cooperation; rather, it is often shown that ‘good fences make good neighbours’, as the saying goes. Social capital, in contrast, is – by definition – a type of capital3. According to varying definitions, it may consist of social networks but also of norms, enforcement of rules, generalized trust, or organisations. Its purposes and uses are thus more clearly defined than its substance, which is somewhat fuzzy. Social capital is good for something, not an end in itself, and its usefulness lies in being fungible with other forms of capital: financial, human, cultural, etc. Social capital is thus by definition an asset, not a liability, despite the frequent emphasis placed on its possible negative effects (Portes, 1998). The variations of social capital theory popular in economics particularly have economic production as their ultimate dependent variable (Flap & Voelker, 2004; Dasgupta & Serageldin, 2000; Wolz & Fritzsch in this volume). Unlike social capital, networks are formally neutral and can support the spread of information and mutual help just as well as deadly micro-organisms. Social network analysis explains social order and social structure, not production. This is at least true on the level of network theory (White, 2008; Granovetter 1973, 1982), while, technically speaking, methods of social network analysis have been used to explain very diverse entities. From a theoretical perspective, social networks are an alternative to the older variations of sociological class theory, which explains what people do by what they have; to structural-functional theory, which explains it by what values and behavioural rules they internalise and how institutions coerce them; and to methodological individualism, which explains it as rational choice according to individual preferences. Social network theory focuses instead on where people stand in relation to others, what their co-workers, competitors, kin, or neighbours   The phrase was coined by Bourdieu (1986). For different adaptations much more popular in economics, see Coleman (1988) and Putnam (2000). A critical overview is Portes (1998).

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do, and how they interact with each other. Moreover, social network theory deals both with the emergence of social structure from individual behaviour and with the explanation of human agency within its structural context. Over-socialised sociological functionalism assumes that collective norms are just somehow injected into the motivations of individuals. Under-socialised economics and rational choice theory assume that the interest to optimise utility or profit is somehow naturally present in the consciousness of individuals who are assumed to (or who think they are somehow obliged to) be egoists. Social network theory (particularly as developed by Harrison White) aims to plausibly explain the ways in which people create their identities, images, and values by marking closeness and distance to others (Granovetter, 1985). It may make as much sense to present an image of oneself as an altruistic family man in one relational context, as to depict oneself as a rational and profit-maximizing egoist in another. According to this view, storytelling is the fundament of action and structure (White, 2008). Network theory thus deals in a new way with the old question of how to connect the general to the individual, the macro with the micro, which has long since vexed historians and social scientists. Kinship, at the core of classical ethnology, only recently gained attention among historians. The primary driving force in new kinship history was David Sabean’s ambitious micro study of the village of Neckarhausen in southwest Germany. In reaction to the sociological modernisation view sketched above, he pointed to the presence and relevance of kinship precisely where it had been ignored by the classical sociologists: i.e., in modernising and increasingly market-oriented societies, especially within the new bourgeois class in the nineteenth century (Sabean, 1997, 1998; Sabean et al., 2007). In the long run, kinship did not disappear when states and markets came into existence. It changed in a way that was causally linked to changes in politics and in contractual relations. The medieval emergence of houses as the fundamental unit of society and the modern building of economic classes in a market society were both connected to changes in alliance systems, as observed predominantly in the study of marriage choice. Kinship historians mostly lean towards the micro side of the micromacro problem; they tend to treat the kinship structure as a dependent variable and emphasize the way in which it was transformed by individual strategies. However, the tradition of French kinship studies Sabean adopted is essentially structuralist; Gérard Delille, for instance, investigated the strategies of lines or lineages much more than those of individuals and the way in which they become visible in their subjectivity (Delille, 2007). Formal methods of social network analysis are rarely used by kinship historians, and the results of formal studies are not even read: Brudner’s and White’s work on Feistritz (Brudner & White, 1997) and even Padgett’s study on the Medici (Padgett & Ansell, 1993) are conspicuously absent in the footnotes of recent kinship history literature. This ignorance is deplorable since both strands of research address 18

Georg Fertig

the same issues of agency and determination. Both are attempts at emancipation from older social scientific or behaviourist views that modelled shared behaviour as a response to the attributes common among people, such as wealth, occupation, religion, culture, age, sex, and the progress of time. Such models can easily be tested statistically using methods of regression analysis, which assumes that the units of observation are isolated from one another. But isolation is only possible in the model, not in the world we observe. In contrast, both kinship and network studies picture the field of social relations as the context in which human action is possible. There are quite a few barriers between kinship studies, social capital studies and social network analysis. Most obvious is the varying amount of technical methods supported by readers and researchers; neither regression coefficients nor betweenness indicators are familiar to everyone. This is, however, a barrier within the disciplines as much as between them. Some historians have always specialised in quantitative or qualitative methods that were esoteric in comparison to the general approach taken by the trade; some important books written by sociologists do not have a single table; there are even economists who do not understand the concept of weak ergodicity, which is central to economic demography. Scholars in any discipline tend to overcome these barriers easily whenever they are convinced it is necessary. But is it in fact necessary? Some historians doubt their data have the appropriate quality for formal methods of network analysis, particularly the completeness they would expect before they jump to conclusions regarding how networks were built or made an impact (Alfani and Vári, in this volume, but see, for a formal analysis written somewhat later, Alfani & Munno, 2012). Historians typically proceed with two steps: first they try to reconstruct past worlds in their full complexity, and then they reduce complexity by offering scientific explanations. You cannot make formal methods attractive to historians by simplifying them. Contrarily, methods must be as adequate as possible for a very complex world. Network analysis, as a paradigm of data analysis, is better prepared to meet this expectation than regression analysis because it radically jettisons the assumption that actors are independent: an assumption that has made the analysis of mass data seem inherently dull and lacking in complexity. One of the factors that limited the popularity of network methods among historians most was that until very recently, standard network software ignored the time dimension and did not even provide the attachment of a date attribute (starting and ending year, month, and day) to a relation between two actors. In recent software however (such as Pajek and Siena), the time dimension of social relations is explicitly addressed. Formal methods become more appropriate to historical analysis quite rapidly4.

  For an introduction into Pajek see de Nooy et al. (2005); for Siena, see Ripley et al. (2012).

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Another and perhaps more important gap between history and social sciences regarding social relations is that, in most social capital and social network analyses, it is quite clear what a relation is about. Classical network studies have investigated how to find a job, how to find an abortionist, how to co-work in an industrial plant and the like. Social capital studies more often deal with membership in formal organisations (cf. Wolz & Fritzsch in this volume). Given the bias of social capital studies to look primarily at the positive effects of, for example, bowling together, and the negative effects of ‘bowling alone’ (Putnam, 2000), the focus is again on rather manifest and short-term forms of mutual support, norm enforcement, and information exchange, even though Bourdieu’s interest when coining the term ‘social capital’ was both in the latent structures of relations and in the practice of their everyday reproduction (Bourdieu, 2005). In Bourdieu’s original field, kinship history, the main interest is, conversely, on the latent structures, not the clearly specified and short-term forms of social exchange. In his kinship monograph, Sabean created impressive sketches of the ways in which individual actors dealt with kinship relations they had inherited or constructed. Many of these individual stories are about conflict, as much as they are about cooperation. This does not at all mean that kinship did not matter, but it would be devastating for an argument based on the statistical effect of social capital. Kinship had to be cultivated. Whoever wanted to mobilise it had to invest much of their own reputation, outgoingness, and dedication, which some bothersome fellows simply did not manage to do (a point also noted by social capital and social network studies that emphasized that networks do not come without a cost).5 Sabean’s point is not that kinship nets were worth the cost to ego or the local society; his point is rather that kinship networks were present and relevant, and that those villagers who did not care about them became lost. Another difference between the kinship perspective and those of social networks and social capital is that the exchange relations that matter according to structuralist alliance theory are upheld over the longue durée. While applications of social network analysis to marriage networks are not rare, they typically do not deal with the time dimension of kinship in a very explicit way. A bouclage strategy (that is, marrying the closest kin that were not forbidden in a period when most kin actually were) is only possible if genealogical memory spans over centuries. If patrilines rather than individuals are the carriers of exchange strategies, the question is raised as to how the sense of obligation or social adequacy that compels people to return an exchange is upheld over the generations.6

  See Sabean (1998: 294-99) for the example of a certain Johannes Heinser, who failed economically and socially because he neglected his kinship relations. 6   It is an open question in historical kinship studies whether kinship relations are about short-term cooperation in the context of agricultural work routines as argued, among others, by Mathieu (2007), or about the long-term balance between houses, see Delille (2007). 5

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While some gaps are evident, the commonalities are more interesting. Both kinship and social networks are dynamic forces, sources of change. Both approaches tell us that, in general, the closure of social groups or milieus has costs as well as benefits. Incest should be avoided if one wants to find in-laws as partners in an alliance7. And it is the weak tie – not the intense link to people very close or similar to us – that will give us the opportunities we need8. In contrast, the concept of social capital has often been used to praise all forms of sociability, including those that limit the outlook and liberties of group members, and the naive and euphoric tendency of this concept has often been criticised (Portes, 1998; Ogilvie, 2004; Guinnane, 2005). Nevertheless, if we see social capital as a form of capital – that is, a means of production – then the forging of relations is logically connected to possibilities of economic growth rather than stagnation and stability. While older concepts of (rural) community suggested that stable social relations were the prerequisite of a society that was averse to risk, profit, and growth, the new concepts aim at explaining why growth and change are possible in a world that is not atomised at all. Another issue is mostly relevant for historians. History has always been, more or less, the systematic study of the particular, the heterogeneous, and the complex. The history and tradition of the discipline has presented a certain temptation for writers to restrict their interpretations to the manifest views uttered by the actors themselves, particularly of the important persons who made history. In the 1960s and 1970s, structural social history was popular as an alternative to this subjective approach. Social historians tended to attribute a higher level of objectivity and validity to the structures they meant to observe – such as class, modernisation, economic cycles, or demographic parameters – than to the complex and particular actions of the people they studied (Gumbrecht, 2009). Meanwhile, this approach has been completely reversed, particularly in the fields of rural and family history. Now the conventional way of writing the history of everyday people is to emphasize that everyone was able to live out their own agency, that structures were rather more fragile and emergent than robust and constraining, and that the outlooks of individual agents varied widely. The idea that ‘objective’, overarching historical processes or social structures were in some way more genuine than ‘subjective’ individual experiences is not very compatible with the current approach to writing history. Now of course we can say good riddance to some of the old-fashioned concepts of social history. But something was lost along the way.

7   ‘What, you would like to marry your sister! What is the matter with you anyway? Don’t you want a brother-in-law? […] With whom will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit?’, as cited in Levi-Strauss (1969: 485). 8   For the argument in social network analysis, see Granovetter (1973; 1982).

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As an example, let us look at the concept of family strategies. Originally, it was developed by Bourdieu. According to him, family strategies are patterns of habitualised behaviour that do not have to be (and usually are not) consciously planned (Bourdieu, 1972a). They emerge where they make sense in terms of the collective interests of the family, particularly the imperative of continuing the family business over the generations. Those who pursue family strategies do not have to be rational in the sense usually ascribed to that term in philosophy and the theory of science9. That is, they do not need to display the ability to talk others and themselves into believing that their decisions were well-founded. Nor is it necessary that the actors consciously controlled their actions in such a way that they were able to express the well-foundedness of their actions verbally. ‘Strategy’ is thus close to the concept of rationality, as used in the economics of choice, which of course is not rational at all in the sense of verbal capacities. Similar to family strategies, economic rationality does not imply conscious plans and verbal statements: it is economically rational to think, to argue, and to reason only as much as it is profitable, and it is uneconomical to invest too much time and effort in making unconventional plans. The difference is that Bourdieu offers a concept, habitus, to account for how decisions come about that are neither well-founded in all cases nor necessarily in the interest of the individual who makes them, but rather subjectively naturalised and objectively adequate to the reproduction of the collective entity: i.e., the family. That certain practices do work in the long run is established at the societal, not the individual, level. In the field of family history, the concept of strategy has been treated in a rather unjust way. At first, it was used in an inflationary way, and then given up by leading family historians. When it was discovered that average marriage ages were high, the older jargon would have been to state that society regulated population growth by setting the marriage age at a high level. The strategy jargon then allowed authors to claim that families followed a strategy of late marriage. More recently, historians such as Viazzo, Engelen, and Lynch have tired of this jargon and argue that we should not infer any strategy at all if we do not have evidence of specific verbalised calculations made by the individual actors (Viazzo & Lynch, 2002; Engelen, 2002). Their frustration with the strategy jargon is understandable. But if we limit historical interpretations to a repetition of the actors’ view, we forego our potential ability to understand what truly happened to them, what the constraints were under which they lived, and where the ironies of their life stories lay. For a complete interpretation, we need a triple perspective: our view of the actor’s view, our view of the actor’s situation 9   According to Carl F. Gethmann (1995: 468), rationality is an ability that refers to the validity of claims people make. Such claims are established when there are methods of discourse that are developed, followed, and controlled by rational agents. In short, rationality is the ability to generate well-foundedness. In contrast, in economics ‘rational’ is a term that refers to a quality of behaviour, not of claims, and thus has a much broader definition.

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(including things the actor did not see), and our view of how the actor’s view and the actor’s situation interacted (Berkhofer, 1969). A modicum of structural analysis, in addition to the culturalist reconstruction of actors’ views, can thus be helpful. Both the network approach and the tradition of Lévi-Straussian structural anthropology continued by the new history of kinship offer this kind of emphasis on the contexts that mattered for individual action. Such contexts can only be made visible by outside observers and researchers. Network analysis does this by pointing to the social position of actors relative to other actors. This is in contrast to assuming that either social norms or objective interests are somehow mysteriously internalised and can be taken for granted, an assumption fundamental both to Parsonian sociology and neoclassical economics. Thus, awareness to the new ways in which social relations recently have been analysed in social science can help us bridge the gap between individualism and holism that vexes many social and economic historians of rural societies. One manifestation of the dichotomy of the individual and the whole, historically, has been that of the subject or citizen and the state. All of the chapters in this book deal with politics in some way, even if, as I have argued above, it is typical for rural societies to be somewhat separate from the state, and even though the networks or social relations they discuss are very diverse and only in part ‘political’.

IV.  The argument of the book The book, as a whole, offers us three steps of analysis. We start out with a rather mainstream example for social capital studies. Wolz & Fritzsch look at present-day social relations of farmers in the rural areas of the Czech Republic and Poland, and ask if these are economically useful. Economic usefulness, or exchangeability with economic capital, is the very point of social capital. The authors find that indeed, some types of social capital make sense economically, namely membership in some types of organisations. It is typical for social capital studies in economics and political science that the investigated social relations to be rather formal or non-primary: i.e., organisations, not neighbourhood and kinship. – But, as Wolz’s & Fritzsch’s colleagues Kasarjyan & Buchenrieder argue within an identical theoretical framework, it can be advisable in the context of transition economies to look at primary networks. In their sample from post-Soviet Armenia, family connections turn out to be central to communication and labour, if less to credit (a similar finding for credit appears in Pfister et al.). Kasarjyan & Buchenrieder suggest that social relations (in this case: family) can be converted into economic capital (in this case: labour opportunities). In the present-day Armenian case, this happens in some way that is not directly specified

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in the chapter. But in any case, what we see here can reasonably be interpreted as ‘social capital’. Social capital analysis of this type is quite straightforward; it leaves little room for ambiguity or irony, or for conflicting (under- and over-socialised, group and individual) sources of social capital, or for the negative consequences of sociability. The next group of chapters focuses on the institutional conditions that determine how social relations can be converted into economic capital, and at what cost. Historically, this is not a trivial question at all. We tend to think that the more modern a society is, the more clear-cut the borders are between the economic and the social or private spheres. In this view, conversion of capital sorts (social into economic) seems utterly pre-modern. The main message of these first three chapters written by historians is not just that the economic and the social sphere are blurred, but that there were very precise and often unexpected ways in which they were connected, both in ‘premodern’ and in ‘modern’ settings (see Granovetter, 1985). One may, for example, expect that intra-familial resource flows (such as inheritance or support for needy parents) are disentangled from resource flows that are organised via the labour market (such as work and wages). As Lambrecht shows, this was not the case in eighteenth century Flanders, where the contracts made between servants in husbandry and their farmer masters frequently involved the parents of the servants. Wages were influenced by the amount of benefits parents received directly from their children’s employers; in other words, the family of origin was used as an instrument for saving. – Pfister et al. go in a similar direction, while adding (as do the following chapters) the question as to what consequences institutional changes could have for the relation between networks and resources. In this chapter, the central question is whether the agrarian reforms of the nineteenth century can be interpreted as part of a ‘Great Transformation’ (Polanyi, 1944), disembedding the economic sphere from its social contexts. Social contexts, here and in other papers, are operationalised as family, kinship and godparentship networks. The overall answer, very much in line with the argument in Granovetter (1985), is ‘no’: When farmers had more property rights than before (as an effect of institutional reforms), they continued their habitually established family strategies, balancing the interests of the farm, the farmers and the family members. – In stark contrast to Pfister et al., Munno’s formal network analysis of a land auction in nineteenth-century northern Italy shows disembedding at work. Industrial Follina, to be sure, was a class society in a clearer sense than the more agricultural German places, with upper class and small peasants located at different angles of the kinship networks. We see a society where tradition involved a rhetoric of egalitarianism, which translated, however, into hierarchical rather than horizontal network structures. Over time, the social classes developed an increasing tendency to turn in on themselves. In the middle of the century, when a central communal 24

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resource was privatised, wealth, not network position determined who succeeded in bidding: the auction thus truly symbolises the advent of a modern society, organised by anonymous markets. Munno emphasizes that the auction of common lands was not just the consequence of external political decisions, and that it was brought about by changing attitudes within the community. Thus, her chapter leads us to a third step of analysis, as developed in the next group of papers by four historians and one ethnologist who look at the role social relations had in the construction of institutions. As Granovetter (1992: 7) has argued, political (or economic) institutions themselves can be understood as ‘congealed’ pre-existing networks. In comparison to social capital studies, this involves a deepening of the usual perspective. The authors in this section do not look at the abundance or scarcity of non-government organisations or formal institutions in a given society, but rather at their construction and the role of primary social networks such as kinship and neighbourhood in this process. New institutional structures are not just external shocks; they are developed and shaped by networking strategies (which, in turn, are changed under the impact of institutional innovation). Thus, Alfani studies the arrangements that were chosen for organising the common lands in a village in northern Italy – not far from the one studied by Munno – and its consequences for the structure of social networks of kinship and godparentship within the corporation. (For a more formal study of the same place, see Alfani & Munno, 2012). Like Munno (but in earlier periods, since the sixteenth century), he finds tendencies of increasing inward orientation. These are connected not to the dissolution and auctioning of common lands as in Munno’s case, but to the formal closure of membership in a corporation that organised their use. Over time, closure did not pay off as a network strategy, since it hampered the renewal of the group, and increased the danger that intense relations on the inside strained the group’s relations with the society that surrounded it. – Interactions between institutional innovation and network strategies are also at the focus of Langthaler’s chapter. The debt relief action in the 1930s that he analyses was to some degree an external input from the state at large. It transformed the character of local societies in lower Austria, disentangling personal relations from monetary ones. Like Pfister et al., but with different results, Langthaler is interested in fundamental changes and great transformations in society; more precisely, in the change leading from multifunctional and informal to formal and mono-functional relations, exemplified by the reduction of (socially embedded) credit through state organised ‘debt relief’. Langthaler’s main point is that it was not just the external (Nazi) state intervention that brought about this modernisation, but also a local dynamics of imitation and diffusion. – But a few decennia later, not far from the areas studied by Langthaler, Gertraud Seiser finds an increase in the importance of informal networks in reaction to state intervention. Political changes 25

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in the late twentieth century occurred outside the local societies: Austria became part of the EU, and the Iron Curtain that separated them from Eastern Europe was lifted. Farmers in the Mühlviertel reacted to the changing framework of more markets and more bureaucracy by integrating personal and economic relations. We see here that the network consequences of politics can be very different in different cases. (For other outcomes, the cases of Poland, the Czech Republic and Armenia as discussed in earlier chapters come to mind). They cannot be subsumed under the idea of modernisation or a general trend towards formalisation. This is because networks are not simply the object of state intervention, but are used actively and strategically by actors. – In Guzzi-Heeb’s study of kinship and political mobilisation in a Swiss valley, the central observation is that networks do not mirror structures of class, nor clientele. The Radicals of the Val de Bagnes were very active in building and using their kinship connections, but it would be impossible to reduce their kinship preferences to class interest or political alignment. As Gumbrecht (2009) observed, older (as I would like to say: pre-kinship history) forms of social history assumed that classes were real, and strategies were feeble and questionable, often missing the point of what should be the right ‘consciousness’. Guzzi-Heeb’s work spells out how in the meantime, class has come to be seen as feeble, and agency as the real thing. – The most visible example of institutions as ‘congealed’ networks is presented by András Vári. It seems the Hungarian noblemen who decided to create cooperative financial institutions for the countryside knew exactly how to build a good network, how to include not only those with similar attributes, but also those with good connections. In this case, it seems the perspective of the actors and the perspective of the observer are very similar – as if these noblemen had read Granovetter. The final chapter, by Claire Lemercier, will review the possibilities formal network methods have to offer in more detail. Not all chapters in this volume use network analysis in a technical, formal sense. It was the task of this introduction to show that a network perspective is helpful far beyond the field of social network analysis in a formal sense, and that both kinship history and social capital studies are able to profit from this still innovative paradigm.

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Bibliography A lfani, G. & Munno, C. (2012), ‘Godparenthood and Social Networks in an Italian Rural Community: Nonantola in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in G. A lfani & V.  Gourdon (eds), Spiritual Kinship in Europe, 1500-1900, New York, Palgrave, p. 96-123. Berkhofer, R. (1969), A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis, New York, Free Press. Bourdieu, P. (1972a), ‘Les Stratégies matrimoniales dans le système de reproduction’, Annales ESC, 27, 4-5, p. 1105-1127. Bourdieu, P. (1972b), Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie Khabile, Geneva, Librairie Droz. Bourdieu, P. (1986), ‘The (Three) Forms of Capital’, in J. G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research in the Sociology of Education, New York & London, Greenwood Press, p. 241-258. Bourdieu, P. (2005), ‘Principles of Economic Anthropology’, in N. J. Smelser & R. Swedberg (eds), The Handbook of Economic Sociology, 2nd ed., Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, p. 75-89. Brudner, L. A. & White, D. R. (1997), ‘Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories’, Theory and Society, 25, p. 161-208. Coleman, J. S. (1988), ‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital’, American Journal of Sociology, 94, Supplement, p. S95-S120. Dasgupta, P. & Serageldin, I. (eds) (2000), Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective, Washington, World Bank. Delille, G. (2007), ‘Kinship, Marriage, and Politics’, in D. Sabean, S. Teuscher & J.  Mathieu (eds), Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (13001900), New York, Berghahn Books, p. 163-183. De Nooy, W., Mrvar, A. & Batagelj, V. (2005), Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, E. (1997), The Division of Labor in Society, New York [original: 1893], Free Press. Engelen, T. (2002), ‘Labour Strategies of Families: A Critical Assessment of an Appealing Concept’, International Review of Social History, 47, p. 453-464. Flap, H. D. & Voelker, B. (2004), Creation and Returns on Social Capital, London, Routledge. Gethmann, C. F. (1995), ‘Rationalität’, in J. Mittelstrass (ed.), Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, 4 vols, III, p. 468-481.

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Granovetter, M. (1973), ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78, p. 1360-1380. Granovetter, M. (1982), ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited’, in P.  V.  Marsden & N. Lin (eds), Social Structure and Network Analysis, Beverly Hills, London & New Delhi, p. 105-130. Granovetter, M. (1985), ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, 91, p. 481-510. Granovetter, M. (1992), ‘Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis’, Acta Sociologica, 35, p. 3-11. Guinnane, T. W. (2005), ‘Trust: A Concept Too Many’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1, p. 77-92.

Gumbrecht, H. U. (2009), ‘Wie objektiv ist Wehler?’, in P. Bahners & A. Camann (eds), Bundesrepublik und DDR: Die Debatte um Hans-Ulrich Wehlers ‘Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte’, Munich, Beck, p. 346-350.

Harnisch, H. (1991), ‘Die Landgemeinde im ostelbischen Gebiet (mit Schwerpunkt Brandenburg)‘, in P. Blickle (ed.), Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Mitteleuropa, ein struktureller Vergleich, Munich, Oldenbourg, p. 309-332. Levi-Strauss, C. (1969), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Boston, Beacon Press. Malinowski, B. (1953 ), Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, London [original: 1922], Routledge. Mathieu, J. (2007), ‘Kin Marriages, Trends and Interpretations from the Swiss Example’, in D. W. Sabean, S. Teuscher & J. Mathieu (eds), Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900), New York, Berghahn Books, p. 211-230. Mauss, M. (2007), Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques, Paris [original: 1924 & 1925], Presses universitaires de France. Meier, E. von (1881), Die Reform der Verwaltungs-Organisation unter Stein und Hardenberg, Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot. Mendras, H. (1976), Sociétés paysannes : Élements pour une théorie de la paysannerie, Paris, Armand Colin. Moser, P. & Varley, T. (eds) (2010), Integration through Subordination: Agriculture and the Rural Population in European Industrial Societies, Turnhout, Brepols. Oestreich, G. (1968), ‘Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 25, p. 329-347. Ogilvie, S. C. (2004), ‘How does Social Capital Affect Women? Guilds and Communities in Early Modern Germany’, American Historical Review, 109, p. 325-359. Padgett, J. F. & Ansell, C. (1993), ‘Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434’, American Journal of Sociology, 98, p. 1259-1319. 28

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Petmezas, S. & Vivier, N. (2009), ‘The State and Rural Societies, Introduction’, in N. Vivier (ed.), The State and Rural Societies: Policy and Education in Europe, 17502000, Turnhout, Brepols, p. 11-33. Polanyi, K. (1957), The Great Transformation, Boston, MA [original: 1944], Beacon Press. Polanyi, K. (1957), ‘The Economy as Instituted Process’, in K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg & H. Pearson (eds), Trade and Markets in the Early Empires, Glencoe, The Free Press, IL, p. 243‑270. Portes, A. (1998), ‘Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology’, Annual Reviews of Sociology, 24, p. 1-24. Putnam, R. D. (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, Simon & Schuster. Ripley, R. M., Snijders, T. A. B. & Preciado, P. (2012), ‘Manual for RSiena, Oxford [http:// www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/siena/RSiena_Manual.pdf, retrieved 29 August 2012]. Sabean, D. W. (1997), ‘Die Ästhetik der Heiratsallianzen. Klassencodes und endogame Eheschließung im Bürgertum des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in J. Ehmer, T. Hareven & R. Wall (eds), Historische Familienforschung, Ergebnisse und Kontroversen, Frankfurt-amMain, Campus-Verlag, p. 157-170. Sabean, D. W. (1998), Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Sabean, D., Teuscher, S. & Mathieu, J. (eds), Kinship in Europe: Approaches to LongTerm Development (1300-1900), New York, Berghahn Books. Simmel, G. (1908), ‘Die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise’, in G. Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, p. 305344. Smith, A. (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Dublin, [printed for Messrs. Whitestone, Chamberlaine, W. Watson, Potts, S. Watson]. Tönnies, F. (2001), Community and Civil Society, ed. J. Harris, Cambridge & New York [original: 1887], Cambridge University Press. Viazzo, P. P. & Lynch, K. A. (2002), ‘Anthropology, Family History, and the Concept of Strategy’, International Review of Social History, 47, p. 423-452. White, H. C. (2008), Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Princeton, Prentice-Hall. Wolf, E. (1966), Peasants, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall.

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2.



The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes: First evidence from farm surveys in Central and Eastern Europe1 Axel Wolz & Jana Fritzsch

I.  Introduction During the socialist period, agricultural production was dominated by collective and state farms in Central and Eastern Europe with the exception of Poland and the former Yugoslavia. With the change of the political regime in 1989-1990, it was assumed that the collective and state farms would be transformed into private farms or even family farms relatively quickly. This seemed to be the conclusion not only in line with historical experience, but also of most neo-classical and neo-institutional economists (see for a summary discussion: Schmitt, 1993: 143-159). While many persons have taken up private farming, it has not become as important as anticipated. Particularly, in East Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic agricultural production is dominated by corporate farms, i.e., transformed agricultural co-operatives, jointstock companies and limited liability companies. However, the transformation of the agricultural sector not only involved the organisation of agricultural production, but also the reorganisation of the supporting organisations for the newly established agricultural producers. Both managers of the corporate farms and private farmers had to learn how to organise agricultural production in a market-economy. Agricultural statistics show that among both groups, not all of them are equally successful economically. This is generally explained in economics by varying production factor endowments. However, it was observed that similar production factor endowments do not necessarily lead to similar economic results (Slangen et al., 2004). Therefore, the research question was raised as to whether an additional, so far underrated, production factor might be significant. This factor is called social capital. Whether it can be identified as an independent production factor leading to higher agricultural income will be the focus of this analysis. In this regard, it was discussed why the socio-economic transformation of the agricultural sector in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has not been as successful 1   Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the participants of the COST Conference held in Münster (Germany), and particularly Rui Santos for providing helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Similarly, the authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

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as originally anticipated. Many factors seem to be of influence: underdeveloped rural financial systems and the complicated mode of farm restructuring led to limited access to loans due to lack of profitability, collateral problems, risks and uncertainty. Similarly, the farm sector was characterised by a weak human capital structure for managing private farms, fragmented land ownership, rapid changes in agricultural policies and an incomplete legal framework (Rozelle & Swinnen, 2004; Bezemer, 2002: 1301-107). In addition, it was argued that the poor results of the agricultural transformation process had resulted from a low level of social capital (e.g., Paldam & Svendsen, 2000; Chloupková & Bjornskov, 2002: 245). However, so far only a few studies on the role of social capital for rural development in general and agricultural development specifically have been done on transition economies. A very comprehensive overview of research on social capital in CEE has been presented by Mihaylova (2004), but overall it can be said that there is still little known about the economic effects of social capital with respect to agricultural producers in transition economies. The academic debate in agricultural economics and the empirical analysis concerning this issue have just started. We wish to help fill this gap. Our analysis is based on the hypothesis that social capital is indeed a significant factor leading to higher agricultural incomes. This hypothesis covers two aspects: on the one hand, we have to show that social capital can be identified as an independent production factor and, on the other, we have to test whether it really contributes to higher agricultural income. We will draw on survey data from four separate studies, which were designed and executed at IAMO with the support of national research institutes. These studies were carried out in Poland in 2000, and in the Czech Republic in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

II.  Concept of social capital The concept of social capital has been adopted rather recently in social and economic sciences. The idea is based on the assumption that social networks are vital in managing one’s daily life. These networks, however, are not naturally given but must be constructed through investment strategies oriented towards the institutionalisation of group relations, which are usable as a source of other benefits (Portes, 1998: 3). In broad terms, social capital can be defined as networks, norms and trust that facilitate information sharing, collective decision-making and collective action. Yet social capital can be also seen as a productive resource, which can be put to work and might be converted into other factors. In this respect, researchers disagree whether it can be regarded as an attribute of an individual in a social context (e.g., Bourdieu, 1986) or as a group property (e.g., Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1993). Due to its recent emergence, broad ambit and multi-disciplinary nature, the conceptual literature is still evolving 32

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(Productivity Commission, 2003: 5). Therefore, there has been much criticism about the vagueness of the concept, as simply too many meanings are associated with it, and a consensus about a commonly acknowledged one is still missing. Hence, some economists are very sceptical about the concept (e.g., Manski, 2000: 121-123), while others encourage continuing the debate (e.g., Durlauf, 2002: F418). In economics, the concept gained prominence with the execution of the ‘Social Capital Initiative’ by the World Bank during the second half of the 1990s. Conventionally, economic theory suggests that growth and development are based on the efficient adoption of production factors; i.e., land, labour and capital and, since its recognition in economics during the 1960s, human capital. Together they determine income and wealth of enterprises and nations (Grootaert, 1998: 1). When analysing economic performance, the ambitious claim was put forward that social capital might constitute an independent, and hitherto under-appreciated, factor of production (Woolcock, 2002: 20-21). More specifically, the social capital question concerns the benefits and costs of co-operation. Olson’s study (1965) on the logic of collective action can be seen as the basic work of research on organisational development. Incentives, costs and expected profits are discussed as the central issues that motivate people to act together. The basic hypothesis concerning social capital’s impact assumes that the welfare within the group generally will be enhanced, in the sense that the collective gains net of costs to group members will be positive (Knack, 2002: 43). As a consequence of this discussion, there were calls for a more tightly focused micro-definition of social capital and a ‘lean and mean’ conceptualisation focusing on the sources – that is, primarily social networks – rather than its consequences (which can be either positive or negative, depending on the circumstances), such as trust, tolerance and co-operation. The focus is on the micro level and the structural elements. The upside of this approach is that it is more or less clear about what is, and what is not, social capital, making for more accurate measurement and more parsimonious theory building; the downside is that it tends to overlook the broader institutional environment in which communities are inherently embedded (Woolcock, 2002: 22). In our analysis we followed this more pragmatic approach. In line with other authors (e.g., Sobel, 2002: 139), we used a quite narrow definition of social capital. We referred to Rose who defines social capital as follows: ‘Social capital consists of informal social networks and formal organisations used by individuals and households to produce goods and services for their own consumption, exchange or sale’ (Rose, 2000: 1). In this respect, the focus is laid on the micro-level and the structural side. The cognitive side of social capital was bypassed at this stage. Closely linked to the

33

The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes

discussion about the definition is the question of how to quantify and measure social capital. The number and focus of adopted indicators differ both geographically and sectorally (Grootaert & van Bastelaer, 2002: 6-7). However, ultimately it is aimed at identifying one or two core indicators of social capital that reflect its impact like those with respect to human capital (‘social capital dream’, Paldam & Svendsen, 2000). In line with the call for a more tightly focused definition of social capital, the number of relevant indicators is supposed to be reduced.

III.  Methodology III.1. Model In this respect, we started our empirical analysis with a very condensed model of social capital. We concentrated on the micro-level and the structural side, i.e., on the relatively ‘easy’ task of obtaining quantitative data. This approach requires a limited number of indicators, which can be relatively easily assessed, e.g., membership in formal and informal organisations. At a later stage, provided these first analyses show positive results, i.e., confirm our hypothesis, we plan to enlarge the concept. In order to test our hypothesis that social capital forms an additional independent factor of production influencing agricultural income positively, we referred to a general econometric model that looks as follows: AI = f(la, lb, ca, hc, ps, sc) where AI = agricultural income, la = land, lb = labour, ca = capital, hc = human capital, ps = production structure, and sc = social capital.

In line with conventional economic theory, we must include the classical economic growth parameters, i.e., labour, land, capital and human capital. In our model, we apply production structure as an additional independent variable, which can be understood as a rough proxy of the farming system. It reflects the most important farm activities and determines agricultural income to a large extent. It is used as an approach for analysing decisions of agricultural producers and their linkages to other rural stakeholders (Doppler, 2000). Finally, we included parameters reflecting social capital. These are the independent variables which must be recorded by an empirical survey. The dependent variable is agricultural income.

III.2. Data In order to test our model, we had to rely on primary data for analysis. Up to now, we could make use of four separate surveys among private farmers and corporate farm managers in CEE. As we were at the start of our project and had to show the 34

Axel Wolz & Jana Fritzsch

relevance of social capital indicators on agricultural income first, we were not in a position to do our own empirical survey focusing on social capital, but relied on other surveys which (1) either had been executed already and included some social capital related indicators or (2) we had the opportunity to add some social capital relevant questions to already envisaged empirical surveys. Hence, none of these four surveys focused on social capital as such. This comparative analysis is based on four studies which were discussed in more detail elsewhere. In Table 2.1, the main methodological indicators of these four empirical surveys are summarised: Table 2.1. Main indicators of the four IAMO social capital surveys Number of social capital related variables

Survey year

Number of respondents (N)

Total number of variables

Poland (private farmers)

2000

410

16

2

Czech Republic (both groups)

2003

12

5

Czech Republic (corporate farms) Czech Republic (private farmers)

62 of which 42 corporate and 20 private

2004

166

22

13

2004

65

25

15

Country, target group

Sources. Poland: Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2006a). Czech Republic 2003: Wolz, Fritzsch & Pencáková (2006). Czech Republic corporate: Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2006b). Czech Republic private: Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2005).

Although it was attempted in all surveys to portray a realistic picture of the respective farming groups, the samples cannot be seen as fully representative due to their relatively small sizes and a certain regional focus within the respective country. The empirical survey in Poland was carried out in close collaboration with two Polish partner universities, while all three surveys covering the Czech Republic were designed and conducted with the Institute of Agricultural Economics (VUZE) in Prague. All interviews were conducted face-to-face. As shown in Table  2.1, a different number of variables were applied for analysis. Behind these more condensed variables reflecting the ‘traditional’ production factors and production structure a varying number of indicators are hidden (see Figure 2.1). Particularly, the factors land, labour, capital and production structure are summarised into one and, in specific cases, two or more variables. In general, for land we use the size of arable land but without any differentiation with respect to its fertility or location, for labour the sum of total working time, and for capital the total book value of assets including buildings, machines and equipment, animals and perennial crops. The production 35

The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes

structure is measured according to the significance of crop and animal production to the gross agricultural income. Human capital, like social capital, cannot be measured directly, but must be determined by proxy indicators. In our surveys, we used at least two up to five different ones. In general, they cover age, educational level and professional experience. Figure 2.1. Model (left side) and used variables (right side) Agricultural income determined by Land Labour Capital

Total agricultural turnover Amount of arable land Total annual working time Value of capital Age Education

Human capital

Professional experience

Production structure

Share of crop production in agricultural output

Social capital

Passive membership Active membership Participation in activities Marketing channels Number of co-operations Participation in public activities Inviting of representatives

Source. Own figure.

With respect to social capital, again proxy indicators must be applied. In our surveys, we started with a relatively small number and gradually tried to include more and more facets of social capital in the following surveys. In the Polish survey, we had to rely on two variables, only. We concentrated on membership in formal organisations, both passive and active. While passive membership simply means membership as such, i.e., paying membership fees and participating in meetings, active membership involves election and service by the respective members in the self-governing bodies of an organisation. With respect to the first Czech survey covering both corporate farms managers and private farmers, we could draw on five separate variables. Three of them referred to passive membership in three types of supporting organisations (i.e., Chamber of Agriculture, lobbying and professional organisations) and two variables to different types of sales channels of agricultural 36

Axel Wolz & Jana Fritzsch

products; i.e., either through joint marketing organisations or through other ones not requiring this special type of social capital. In the last two surveys covering either corporate farm managers or private farmers in the Czech Republic, the number of social capital variables could be increased as a number of questions could be added to the original questionnaire. While thirteen social capital-related variables could be enquired among corporate farm managers, their number came up to fifteen with respect to private farmers. For both groups, the structural formal side of social capital comprised ten variables. In a first part, interviewees were asked about passive and active membership and participation in any activities of the Chamber of Agriculture as well as the major lobbying organisation. It is evident that the major lobbying organisation is a different one for these two groups of agricultural producers. The other four variables refer to the used marketing channels, which we see as a good proxy-indicator for the ability of the agricultural producers to build up networks promoting their economic situation. We were concentrating on the three major marketing channels, i.e., joint marketing through marketing co-operatives based on voluntary membership as well as sales to agri-trade enterprises and domestic processors. Finally, interviewees were asked about the number of agricultural products with respect to joint marketing. In addition to these ten variables reflecting the formal structural side of social capital, another three with respect to corporate farm managers and four variables with respect to private farmers cover the informal side. Both groups were asked about their ability to co-operate with other farm enterprises in various activities, i.e., number of co-operations and how often they took part in public activities. Only farm managers were asked whether they invited representatives of the municipality to farm events. On the other side, only private farmers were asked to assess their relations with fellow private farmers and corporate farms respectively in the locality. Finally, only private farmers were asked about trust; i.e., whether they were confident enough to borrow money (i.e., an amount covering a week’s worth of expenses) from persons who do not belong to the nuclear family, which covers already an aspect of the cognitive side of social capital.

III.3. Statistical methods In the first analytical step, we separated social capital as an independent production factor not correlated with the classical production factors. We used factor analysis in this step (as e.g., Woodhouse, 2006). The factor analysis is a multivariate statistical procedure that extracts independent factors from a set of correlated variables. These factors are linear combinations of the original variables (Backhaus et al., 2003; Hair et al., 2006; Stevens, 2002). Factor analysis starts with a matrix of paired correlation 37

The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes

coefficients. In our empirical investigation, we use Kendall’s ‘τ’ (‘tau’) as correlation coefficient. One precondition for the factor analysis is that the correlation matrix is suitable for the procedure, i.e., that the paired correlations are high. We assess the suitability of our correlation matrix by using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin criterion (MSA:  measure of sampling adequacy) considering our matrix as not suitable if MSA0.05). In every step, only one factor is excluded, beginning with the factor with the lowest significance level, and then the model is calculated again. This process stops when only significant factors remain.

IV.  Empirical results This section presents the comparative analysis of the empirical results. It starts with the factor analysis and continues with the multiple regression analysis.

IV.1.

Factor analysis

We use factor analysis to identify social capital as an independent factor of production not correlated with any other production variable, e.g., farm size or the educational level of the agricultural producers. As discussed above, a matrix of correlation coefficients (Kendall’s ‘τ’) was used as input data. A broad overview of the results of the four surveys is given in Table 2.2, below. Table 2.2. Main results of the factor analysis of four IAMO social capital surveys Country, survey

MSA criterion (at least 0.5)

Poland, 2000, private

0.70

Czech Republic, 2003, both

0.69

Explained variability (at least 0.6) 0.62 0.79

Number of factors Number of social extracted capital related factors 6

1

4

2

Czech Republic, 2004, corporate

0.65

0.67

9

5

Czech Republic, 2004, private

0.64

0.71

9

5

Sources. Poland: Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2006a). Czech Republic 2003: Wolz, Fritzsch & Pencáková (2006). Czech Republic corporate: Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2006b). Czech Republic private: Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2005).

In all four surveys, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin criterion ranged between 0.64 and 0.70, proving the matrix as standard mediocre and therefore suitable for factor analysis (Backhaus et al., 2003). Through PCA with varimax rotation and Kaiser normalisation, four to nine factors could be extracted from the set of 12 to 25 variables, respectively, explaining between 62 per cent and 79 per cent of the total variance in the variables included. With respect to all four surveys, the share of explained

39

The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes

variance is greater than 60 per cent (Hair et al., 2006) and therefore considered to be sufficient for interpretation and further calculations. The number of extracted factors came up to four to nine different ones, i.e., all those factors with an eigenvalue greater than one. In the next step, we labelled all extracted factors according to the variables that have factor loadings greater than 0.6 or less than -0.6. In all surveys, one factor stood for the traditional production factors; i.e., land, labour and capital. Another factor or sometimes up to three stood for various aspects of human capital; i.e., age, educational level, work experience and/or participation in advanced training and informal exchange of experience. In all surveys, production structure could be extracted as an independent factor. – In all the surveys, at least one factor could be extracted which reflects social capital. In this respect, the first part of the analysis could be successfully accomplished. Social capital was identified as an independent production factor which does not coincide with the traditional ones. Specifically, the social capital factors appear as follows: – With respect to the Polish survey, one factor had been identified which was labelled ‘active membership in organisations and education’. There is a link to a human capital variable. However, the other human capital related variables, i.e., age, job experience and experience as farm family head formed a very strong human capital factor on their own. – With respect to the Czech survey from 2003, two separate social capital factors could be extracted. We named them ‘marketing through joint marketing organisations and membership in supporting organisations’. – In both Czech surveys concerning corporate farm managers and private farmers which had been executed in 2004, five different social capital factors were identified. For both groups, three almost identical factors could be extracted: ‘passive and active membership in lobbying organisations and participation in their activities, marketing through joint marketing organisations and marketing through agri-trade enterprises (marketing companies)’. The last factor stands for a marketing channel that needs contacts to these companies but no co-operation with fellow farm enterprises. Hence, we understand this factor as representing a form of marketing which actually requires no social capital. With respect to the corporate farm managers, the other two were labelled as ‘passive and active membership in the Chamber of Agriculture and participation in their activities and public relations and co-operation’. With regard to private farmers, the fourth factor was labelled ‘informal networks’, which comprise the number of co-operations with fellow farmers and their assessment of relations 40

Axel Wolz & Jana Fritzsch

with fellow farmers and corporate farms in the area. Finally, we labelled the last factor as ‘cognitive social capital’ reflecting the confidence in borrowing money (the equivalent of the expenses of one week), from a distant family member, friend or neighbour. Taking into account all four surveys, we could conclude that the results of the factor analysis show independent factors indicating that social capital can be clearly separated from the classical production factors. Or, in other words, it has been shown that in our samples, farm size per se or volumes of capital are not related to a higher level of social capital. In a final step, the factor scores for the four to nine independent factors were computed to replace the 12 to 25 correlated variables, respectively, in a multiple regression model and to test whether the one to five social capital factors have a significant effect on agricultural income.

IV.2.

Multiple regression analysis

In order to test the second part of our hypothesis, i.e., that social capital enhances the level of agricultural income, we calculated the following general linear multiple regression model2 for all three Czech surveys: k

Z_AI = Σ (b(i)* factor(i)) + e i=1

Z_AI: standardised agricultural income b(i): coefficient for the ith factor, i=1..k factor(i): scores for the ith factor, i=1..k k: number of factors e: error term

The Polish data were analysed with a multiple regression model of third order. Due to missing values and some outliers in each sample, the number of valid cases which could be processed in the multiple regression analysis declined. As discussed above, non-significant factors are in a stepwise manner excluded from the model, beginning with the factor with the lowest significance level. The calculation stops when only significant factors remain. In the following, the results of the regression analysis will be briefly discussed referring to the survey among corporate farm managers in the Czech Republic as an example (Wolz et al., 2006b). In this analysis, the total number of valid cases came up to 102.

 

2

Since the factor scores are standardised values, the regression model does not include a constant.

41

The role of social capital in promoting agricultural incomes

Table 2.3 summarises the results of the regression analysis of the Czech survey among corporate farm managers, i.e., on the left side for the complete model and on the right side for the reduced model with significant factors only. Both models are highly significant and explain about 60 per cent of agricultural income. The impact of five of the nine factors was not significant in the first model. Only the factors (1) land, labour and capital, (2) passive and active membership in lobbying organisations and participation in their activities, (6) farm managers’ education and (9) production structure were significant. In the following, the model was reduced in a stepwise manner to a model comprising only significant factors. Table 2.3. Results of the multiple regression analysis of a survey among corporate farm managers in the Czech Republic Factor(i) Land, labour and capital

Model with all factors b(i)

p-value

Model with significant factors onlya b(i)

p-value

0.887

0.000

0.880

0.000

0.160

0.018

0.142

0.039

0.071

0.231

-0.101

0.095

Public relations and co-operations

0.048

0.454

Farm management’s education

0.195

0.002

0.204

0.001

Farm management’s work experience

-0.052

0.424

Marketing through agri-trade enterprises

-0.060

0.335

Passive and active membership in lobbying organisations and participation in their activities

Marketing through joint marketing organisations Membership and active participation in the chamber of agriculture

Production structure

b

Corrected R2

0.140

0.023 0.610

0.590

Source. Wolz, Fritzsch & Reinsberg (2006b). Notes. N = 102. (a) We used a significance level of 95% (p