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Sport, Trust, and Social Capital


Research in social capital has appealed to the causal power of sport to generate the kinds of generalized trust, ties, and networks that make for more prosperous communities and more democratic societies. Indeed, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2001) takes as the core of its argument the idea that participation in bowling clubs in the United States contributed, in no small way, to ‘making democracy work’ in America. In this way sport appears to be construed as a mechanism for the production of generalized trust and, more broadly, social capital. This study scrutinizes Putnam’s understanding of sport in an effort to make explicit the limits of what participation in sport can be expected to contribute to the formation of generalized trust and social capital. In the context of sport, generalized trust and social capital, the author argues, are best understood in theoretical and empirical terms as stratified and stratifying features of human interaction. Sport does not produce generalized trust and social capital but rather re-produces and reinforces the presence of such resources along socioeconomic and ethnoracial lines.