Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- 10 Health, Class, Place, and Politics: Social Capital, Opting in and Opting out of Collective Provision in Nineteenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Britain
- 11 Health by Association? Social Capital, Social Theory, and the Political Economy of Public Health
- 12 Public Health and Security in an Age of Globalizing Economic Growth: The Awkward Lessons of History
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
11 - Health by Association? Social Capital, Social Theory, and the Political Economy of Public Health
from PART III - History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- 10 Health, Class, Place, and Politics: Social Capital, Opting in and Opting out of Collective Provision in Nineteenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Britain
- 11 Health by Association? Social Capital, Social Theory, and the Political Economy of Public Health
- 12 Public Health and Security in an Age of Globalizing Economic Growth: The Awkward Lessons of History
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the ongoing quest to improve our understanding of the conditions that make for improved public health and wellbeing, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have recently returned in earnest to a theme with a long and distinguished history in the social sciences—namely, following Durkheim, the importance of social circumstances in shaping the quality of life one enjoys. This has been fueled in part by the indifferent performance of a series of high-profile public service delivery reforms, the widening rhetorical appeal of communitarian and neo-liberal policy discourse, and a growing recognition that ever-more sophisticated medical interventions and media campaigns have had a disappointing impact on some of society's most persistent social ills (e.g., smoking, depression, teen pregnancy). Within the public health field, these failures of policy have increasingly focused attention on the limitations of a narrowly “individualist” approach to population health, associated with the rise of clinical epidemiology during the postwar era. The debate, reviewed below, has centered on the persistence of health inequalities in affluent societies, and the extent to which more effective research and policies should prioritize the psychological experience of individuals and their relationships to others in their community and society, or the material deprivations due to overall economic structures and national political choices.
All sides in this debate have deployed the idea of social capital in support of their particular claims, in the process encapsulating many of the (inherent) conceptual ambiguities, dilemmas, and concerns surrounding the term in general.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health and WealthStudies in History and Policy, pp. 376 - 415Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005