This article introduces a concept of social capacity and offers a method of studying it. Social capacity is people's ability to work together to organize public relationships, rather than give responsibility for those relationships wholly to state actors or the flux of market exchange. The article proposes that to study social capacity, we examine the everyday group styles of civic life. Those culturally patterned styles enable and constrain a group's ability to imagine and organize its public relationships with the wider social world. The article applies this approach to the “networking” style of a church alliance in a Midwestern U.S. city, whose members were responding to the welfare policy reforms of 1996. Investigating group style allows a focus on civic relationships, or potential civic relationships, across “sectoral” domains and avoids reifying “civil society,” “state,” or “market.” This analytic approach also avoids the elisions and silences that the popular social capital concept often invites.
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