More spray on solution: Community, social capital and evidence based policy.

The article presents four decades of research on social capital, community and evidence based policy in the forty years of publication of the "Australian Journal of Social Issues (AJSI)." Social capital is represented as readily quantifiable, on the basis of local participation. Concept essentially provides for the operationalisation of community, giving this alluring concept its latest lease on life. Various Australian governments now warmly embrace Howard Professor Robert Putnam's work and draw on it for evidence that legitimates their policy development. Before Putnam, social capital had relatively minor status in sociology. The many advantages claimed for higher levels of social capital, as Putnam has promoted the concept, range through greater happiness, better health, higher income and levels of educational achievement, and lower rates of child abuse and other crimes against the person, as well as lower transaction costs. Falling levels of participation and civic engagement are attributed by Putnam to abstract and depoliticised factors like pressures of time and money, urban sprawl, electronic entertainment, especially television, and generational change with the advent of postcivic generations.