Note: For a good article where Robert Putnam explains social capital jargon, see the OECD Observer (3/17/04)
Answers
to Frequently Asked Questions about Social Capital
What does “social capital” mean?
Why the name "Saguaro Seminar"?
How does social capital work?
What are some examples of social capital?
What has been happening to Social Capital in America in
last 2-3 decades?
What caused the decline?
What is the role of the internet in all this?
Aren’t some forms of social capital increasing?
[Things like youth soccer, evangelical religion, etc.]
How can we build social capital?
Is all social capital good?
Isn’t social capital too diverse to be captured
in one term?
Are all forms of social capital good for all purposes?
What are the different types of social capital?
Why is social capital important?
What is the relationship between social capital and happiness?
Why Measure Social Capital?
How Can One Measure Social Capital?
How can social capital be decreasing when the non-profit
sector is booming?
I’ve heard a lot of controversy over whether Putnam
and the “Bowling Alone” thesis is right. Is our civic
disengagement a point of agreement?
Is volunteering increasing?
How does social capital compare with asset-based development?
How social capital measurement compares with sustainable
development?
Is social capital building an end in itself or a means
to an end?
What is the role of government in all this? Is government
our curse or our salvation?
Do the trends of social disengagement differ by race?
Does the social capital decline impact economic classes
differently?
Where can I find more information about social capital?
What
does “social capital” mean?
Social networks have value – that is the central
premise of social capital. Social capital refers to the collective
value of all “social networks” [who people know] and the
inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other
[“norms of reciprocity”].
Why the name "Saguaro Seminar "?
The saguaro [pronounced sah-WAH-ro] is a cactus that
grows in the Sonoran desert in the Southwestern United States. There
are rich parallels between the saguaro and social capital (or civic
engagement). Saguaros were for some time undervalued by modern American
society and often razed. Saguaros are bellwether indicators of the
health of the ecosystem. The saguaro also plays the role of welcoming
host for an environmentally-rich community: vines grow on its trunk;
birds make nests in the saguaro; Native Americans have lived off
its fruit and celebrate its blossoms in festivals; and animals use
saguaro for precious shade. Saguaros have an invisible root system
that is multiples of the visible height of the cacti. And like most
social capital, saguaros grow slowly (husbanding what nourishment
the ecosystem provides) and are tough, long-term survivors.
Seminar, meaning a set of meetings for the exchange
of ideas in an area, comes from the Latin seminarium which means
a seed plot or a nursery.
How does social capital work?
The term social capital emphasizes not just warm
and cuddly feelings, but a wide variety of quite specific benefits
that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation
associated with social networks. Social capital creates value for
the people who are connected and – at least sometimes – for
bystanders as well. Social capital works through multiple channels:
a) information flows (e.g. about jobs, AIDS, college, etc.) depend
on social capital
b) norms of reciprocity (mutual aid) are dependent on social networks.
· Bonding networks sustain particularized (in-group) reciprocity.
· Bridging networks sustain generalized reciprocity.
c) Collective action depends upon social networks (e.g., the role
that the black church played in the civic rights movement) although
collective action can also foster new networks.
d) Broader identities and solidarity are encouraged by social networks
that help translate an “I” focus into a “we”.
What are some examples of social capital?
When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye
on one another's homes, that's social capital in action. When a tightly
knit community of Hassidic Jews trade diamonds without having to
test each gem for purity, that's social capital in action. Barn-raising
on the frontier was social capital in action, and so too are e-mail
exchanges among members of a cancer support group. Social capital
can be found in friendship networks, neighborhoods, churches, schools,
bridge clubs, civic associations, and even bars. The motto in Cheers*"where
everybody knows your name"* captures one important aspect of
social capital. [Or see 150 things you can do to build social capital.]
What has been happening to Social Capital
in America in last 2-3 decades?
We have found a disconcerting, precipitous decline
in social interactions over the last three decades across all forms
of social capital--formal and informal, high-minded and leisure,
public and private. (A much more thorough exploration of this subject
appears in Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000.) We start at the civic
epicenter: We are bowling alone. While a record number of Americans
bowl today, bowling in organized leagues plunged 40 percent from
1980 to 1993. Lest you think this a trivial factoid, over 25% more
Americans (91 million) bowled once or more in 1996 than voted in
the 1998 congressional elections.
Our point is not that bowling is critical to America’s future,
but that in bowling leagues, fraternal organizations, choral societies
and thousands of other places where Americans regularly meet, fellow
citizens talk periodically about issues of civic importance and learn
to trust others and work together. And alas, these civic watering
holes are drying up. Civic do-gooding organizations also have met
hard times. The League of Women Voters has lost 42 percent of its
members since 1969. In the domain of schools, PTAs nationwide plummeted
from a membership high in the early 1960s of almost 50 members per
100 families with school-age children to less than 20 members per
100 in 1997. (This decline can only partly be explained by the movement
of parents from the PTA into Parent Teacher Organizations.)
A composite graph of the market share of 30 mainstream civic organizations
(i.e., the percentage of Jewish women in Hadassah, the percentage
of blacks in the NAACP, the percentage of Catholic men in the Knights
of Columbus, the percentage of youth in 4-H, etc.) shows that composite
membership market share has dropped from its peak in the early 1960s
to levels not seen since just after the Great Depression. And alas,
it’s not just these particular organizations. In 1975-76 the
average American attended some club meeting once a month. By last
year, that figure had dropped 58 percent to only five meetings annually.
Almost two-thirds of Americans attended at least one club meeting
in 1975-76, but only 38 percent did in 1997-98.
Informal associating also has declined. In 1975, the average American
invited friends over more than 14 times yearly. By 1998 that had
dropped 60 percent to only eight times a year. Perhaps most alarmingly,
the family meal--a ritual practiced for millennia--may within our
lifetimes enter the nation’s endangered practices list. The
fraction of married Americans who definitely say "our whole
family usually eats dinner together” has declined a third,
from about 50 percent to 34 percent in just the last two decades,
and this decline ignores the rapidly dwindling fraction of intact
married couples over this period.
One often hears that we are giving more than ever, even in real dollars,
but this is not the relevant statistic. Although philanthropy has
doubled since 1960 in real dollars, real spending on cut-flowers
has tripled and real spending on all forms of entertainment has nearly
quadrupled. We are simply far better off now than then. What is more
relevant is how big a share of our income we give to philanthropy;
that is, after all, what tithing is all about. And while the share
of our national income we gave to philanthropy roughly doubled from
1929 through 1964 (rising almost continuously year to year), it has
since dropped by over a third to approximately our 1940 level.
Generalized trust also has evaporated. While 55 percent of American
adults in 1960 believed others could be trusted most or all of the
time, only 30 percent did in 1998, and the future looks bleaker because
the decline was sharpest among our nation’s youth. Roughly
three-quarters of Americans trusted government to do the right thing
most or all the time in 1960, a figure that sounds quaint today when
less than 25 percent trust the government. This disappearance of
trust has huge ramifications for our ability to cooperate and work
with strangers: a citizen at a town meeting or a new neighbor, businessperson,
classmate or teacher.
A striking piece of evidence about America's civic disengagement came from two former critics of Bowling Alone. They found that from 1984-2004, in a gold-plated study that the percentage of Americans with NO close vonfideantes had been multipled by 2.5 and stood at a quarter of all Americans; they also found that over 40% of all Americans were only 1 friend away from lacking social support, and they found that our close ties are way more dependent on spouses and other family members than they used to be..
What caused it?
This is far too complicated a question to consider
briefly. The interested reader is referred to Professor Robert Putnam’s
forthcoming Bowling Alone. After considering a whole host of reasons,
it is most likely that the cause is probably: 10% sprawl and the
increased geographic complexity of our lives; 10% two-career families
and the fact that men haven’t picked up the civic slack created
when more women entered the paid work force; some 30% television
(which seems to cause viewers to increasingly be less civic and which
has absorbed more than 100% of the increase in leisure time from
the 1960s); and roughly 30% generational trends (as those born after
1930 have increasingly been far less civic than those born before
1930). The final roughly 20% is probably a combination of many other
factors.
What is the role of the internet in all
this?
A much more thorough answer to this question will
be found in Professor Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, so this
answer will merely scratch the surface.
The internet definitely did not cause our civic disengagement.
Our civic disengagement began in roughly 1965 and was well underway
when Bill Gates was even in grade school. However, is the internet
now a part of the problem or the answer to our civic engagement?
Probably both. [We note that predictions of how new technology will
come to be used have almost always been way off – the radio
was envisioned only for ship-to-ship communication, and the telephone
was seen as only a business-to-business communication tool – so
any forecast should be taken with many grains of salt.]
It is hard to believe that if America is civicly re-engaged
by the year 2020 (and we are hopeful that Americans can do this),
that technology won’t have been a significant part of the solution.
That said, there are major hurdles to overcome. First, the digital
divide means that until access to computers and the internet is universal,
it can’t truly be a tool for building diverse ties in American
communities. Second, we communicate huge amounts of information non-verbally,
and it may be a long long time until our virtual communication is
as information-rich as our face to face communication. [Note: even
high definition television videoconference conveys far less information
than face to face communication and hence is less efficient at building
trust.] Third, the technology encourages cyberbalkanization: ever
more specialized groups talking about a very specific problem. In
such groups individuals are flamed for off-point comments. One of
the great virtues of more traditional group get-togethers (like Bowling
Leagues) is that no conversation was considered off-point. This makes
it much harder for our conversations to have peripheral community
vision. It makes us communicate more with those like us who are geographically
distant, and thus causes us to know our neighbors less. This is a
real concern if we need to rally our neighbors to deal collectively
with place-based problems: schools that aren’t working, zoning
issues, crime, or even local environmental issues.
Finally, the issue is whether the internet becomes
more like a nifty phone or a nifty television: i.e., whether it is
used more for enhanced person-to-person communication or more for
enhanced entertainment. There are many incentives for industry to
steer the internet towards a nifty TV and if so, this could have
far more negative impact on civic engagement than even the TV.
Most experts agree that if technology is to succeed,
it will have to be used to reinforce face to face ties. We think
that this issue of technology and civic engagement is a critical
one and we hope that lots of citizens and experts spend a great deal
of time thinking about how we can use the technology to do this.
While the technological solutions have not yet emerged,
there are already examples of people trying to use the technology
to facilitate social capital building. Examples of this can be found
at sites like www.egroups.com (that tries to make it far easier to
form groups), evite.com (that makes it easier to send invitations
for social events), and www.neighborhoodlink.com (that helps neighborhoods
communicate electronically). Some groups like www.volunteermatch.org
have tried to use the technology to make it much easier to find out
about volunteering opportunities. Still other examples that are in
development are the creation of neighborhood directories using the
latest technology, experiments to residents of poor neighborhoods
to get free computers if they share them with neighbors, and software
that makes it really easy to form latent groups (mothers of kids
in a specific 3rd grade class, state park users, etc.) that one can
activate when needed.
Aren’t some forms of social capital
increasing? [Things like youth soccer, evangelical religion, etc.]
Yes, some things definitely are increasing and youth soccer, evangelical
religion, and youth community service are among them. But it has
always been true at any given period that some forms of social capital
and social connectedness are increasing while others are waning.
The question is what is the net impact on social capital when you
add up what's increasing and what's decreasing. And all the examples
proffered are small compared to other declines in those same subject
areas. For example, evangelical religion is increasing dramatically,
but mainline Protestant and Catholic church going is declining even
more rapidly. Similarly, while youth soccer is growing, most other
forms of youth athletic participation are on the decline. And counter
to popular myth, youth soccer has not made up the decline in bowling:
bowlers' ranks are roughly triple the number of soccer parents. Even
if every soccer mom and dad religiously attended all their children's
games, it couldn't make up for the drop in league bowling. In short,
some forms of social capital are growing, but simply not enough to
stem the decline. [A much more thorough treatment of all the possible
counter-examples are explored in Professor Putnam's book Bowling
Alone, which finds no evidence of increases in some things commonly
asserted to be countertrends: e.g., book groups, connections at the office, local
civic associations, crime watch groups, and eating out other than
at fast food restaurants.]
Increases in groups like youth soccer or evangelical
religion or youth community service haven't yet reached the magnitude
to stem
our civic declines, but they may be harbingers of an important civic
resurgence that lies below the surface. In addition, they may well
yield insights into what kinds of civic or social capital opportunities
are attractive. Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein's book Better
Together: Restoring the American Community (2003),
discusses 12 promising examples of social capital building across
the United States and what can be learned from those
examples, in the hopes of catalyzing an increase in our nation's
social capital.
Putnam and Sander in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post "Sept. 11 as Civics Lesson" detailed evidence that there is a new 9-11 Generation forming among youth who were in college or near college age on September 11, 2001.
How can we build social capital?
We build social capital by creating new ties and
strengthening old ones. These connections may increase individual
well-being and opportunity by linking people more strongly to their
local community and to larger societal resources. Or they may build
community by strengthening bonds that link community members or by
bridging divisions between them. The new ties may be formal, like
a club, association, or civic institution, or informal, like a group
of friends talking or colleagues collaborating. There is no limit
to the number of specific pathways to social capital creation. How
to build social capital in each community, family, block, or neighborhood
is best left to community-based groups. [Or see 150 things you can do to build social capital.]
Is all social capital good?
No. Just as some forms of human capital (like
knowledge of chemistry) can be used for destructive purposes (like
building a bomb), so too some forms of social capital (like the Michigan
militia) can have bad social consequences. Fortunately, malevolent
uses of human and social capital are relatively rare, which is why
we continue to teach chemistry in public schools and why we should
continue to try to build social capital.
Isn’t social capital too diverse to
be captured in one term?
Capital is an abstract concept that encapsulates
huge diversity. Economists wondered whether you could talk about
physical capital (which covers everything from a hammer to a computer
to an automobile assembly plant). Similarly, human capital covers
everything from piano lessons to a vocational course in cooking or
automotive repair, to a graduate degree in Philosophy and covers
education of widely differing quality. So too, social capital covers
a wide diversity of relationships: a team at the workplace, conversations
with one’s neighbors, relationships with the teachers of one’s
children, an alumni network, people you volunteered with a couple
of times. The point in all these cases (physical, human, and social
capital) is that these underlying attributes can have real value
to society and that someone embedded in social networks that foster
reciprocity can be more effective than someone who is not in such
networks, the same way as someone possessing physical or human capital
can be more effective in a hour than that same person without this
physical or human capital.
Are all forms of social capital good for
all purposes?
Not all social capital is for everything or everyone.
Just as two different forms of physical capital (a screwdriver vs.
a hydroelectric dam) are useful for different purposes, so two different
forms of social capital (a group of friends at the local bar vs.
a group of colleagues at the local bar association) serve different
social purposes.
What are the different types of social capital?
We won’t try to summarize all the different
types of social capital, but as an indication of some of the ways
in which social capital differs, there are social ties stemming from
informal networks (ordinary socializing, work-place ties, relationships
with neighbors, personal support networks) and those from formal
networks, such as being a member of an organization. Group membership
in such formal organizations consists of both private-minded organizations
(primarily designed to produce fun or fellowship, like a choral society,
a baseball league) and public-minded organizations (designed to tackle
an issue of public concern, like a crime watch group, or a community
service organization).
The social ties produced can be analyzed both according
to the strength of those ties (with strong ties being ones that are
regularly used, where the individuals consider each other to be very
close friends, and which often provide personal support to each other)
and weak ties (where the ties are used only occasionally and tend
to be used more for the flow of information). Similarly, the ties
can be analyzed as to whether they are bridging social capital (bringing
individuals together with others who are unlike them, by race, class,
ethnicity, education, religion, age, or gender, for example) or whether
ties are primarily bonding (that bring individuals together with
others like them). [Most groups are bridging in some ways and bonding
in others: the Knights of Columbus is bonding in terms of religion
(since all the participants are Catholic men) but bridges across
dimensions of class and income.]
What is the relationship between social capital and happiness?
There has been a growing interest in the study of subjective wellbeing (happiness). We held a conference on social capital on wellbeing. While money can buy you happiness, studies have shown that your happiness is only raised when your income is raised relative to others' income; if everyone's income rises there is no increase in happiness. In contrast, if one raises the social capital of a community resident, studies show that it raises both the happiness of that individual and everyone else in the community. Some studies (at least in decisions of what job to take or where to live) reveal that individuals over-estimate the increase in happiness they would get from a higher paycheck or a larger house and underestimate the decrease in happiness they would suffer if their job or new house provides less time or opportunity to socially connect with others. [The BBC has had a report on the Happiness Formula; available here.] And a worldwide map of happiness is available here.
Why is social capital important?
A growing body of hard-nosed literature over the
last several years shows that social capital enables many important
individual and social goods. Communities with higher levels of social
capital are likely to have higher educational achievement, better
performing governmental institutions, faster economic growth, and
less crime and violence. And the people living in these communities
are likely to be happier, healthier, and to have a longer life expectancy.
In places with greater social connectedness, it is easier to mobilize
people to tackle problems of public concern (a hazardous waste facility,
a crime problem, building a community park, to name only a few examples),
and easier to arrange things that benefit the group as a whole (a
child-care cooperative among welfare mothers; a micro-lending group
that enables poor people to start businesses; or farmers banding
together to share expensive tools and machinery).
Why Measure Social Capital?
Quite simply we believe we should measure social
capital for 3 reasons:
1) for people who find social capital a difficult,
abstract concept, measurement helps make the concept more tangible;
2) it increases our investment in social capital: in a performance-driven
era, social capital will be relegated to second-tier status in the
allocation of resources, unless organizations can show that their
community-building efforts are showing results; and
3) measurement helps funders and community organizations build more
social capital. Everything that involves any human interaction can
be asserted to create social capital, but the real question is does
it build any social capital, and if so, how much? Is a specific part
of an organization’s effort worth continuing or should it be
scrapped and revamped? Do mentoring programs, playgrounds, or sponsoring
block parties lead more typically to greater social capital creation?
Measurement will help funders and community organizations increase
their mix of activities into more things that are a 9 or a 10 on
a 10-point scale of social capital creation, and fewer zeroes, ones
or twos.
How Can One Measure Social Capital?
We developed a longer questionnaire on social capital (the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey) and a shorter social capital survey (The Social Capital Short Form). Other countries are doing things to measure social capital.
For more details on measurement see Saguaro's Measurement Page.
How can social capital be decreasing when the non-profit sector is booming?
There is simply said no one-to-one relationship
between the non-profit sector and social capital. While on the margin,
non-profit organizations may be more interested in fostering social
capital than for-profit organizations, one can’t conclude that
because an organization is non-profit, there is thus a lot of social
capital being created. Imagine a non-profit hospital that becomes
privatized: it is hard to imagine that suddenly the social capital
associated with the organization disappears. Similarly many non-profit
membership organizations with regard to social capital among its
members are mere check-writing organizations (like the AARP) that
are surprisingly devoid of social capital, since its members don’t
meet or know each other. Moreover, many forms of social capital (neighborhood
block parties, pickup basketball, etc.) don’t rely on non-profit
organizations at all. In short, while there are many terrific non-profit
organizations that are actively building and strengthening community
connectedness, it is a big mistake to conflate non-profit organizations
with social capital.
I’ve heard a lot of controversy over
whether Putnam and the “Bowling Alone” thesis is right.
Is our civic disengagement a point of agreement?
Much of the controversy surrounding “Bowling Alone” the
article concerned the fact that the article focused significantly
on group memberships and also focused on memberships in specific
organizations (the Elks, bowling leagues, the PTAs). Three key criticisms
were: 1) that it didn’t include informal schmoozing; 2) didn’t
include new more innovative organizations; and 3) didn’t look
at the full range of political forms of participation. Professor
Putnam knew at that time that these other forms of social capital
were equally important, but couldn’t find reliable data source(s)
that would tell us about these civic trends over the last 2-3 decades.
Since then, he accessed data from the Roper Organization and learned
about and got access to the DDB Needham Lifestyle database. Both
of these massive data sets, asked of tens or hundreds of thousands
of Americans over the last 25 years, directly answer these earlier
criticisms and show that these trends of civic disengagement extend
both to organizations in general, to informal schmoozing, and to
12 forms of political participation. No academic has called into
question the reliability of these data. Since the publication of
Bowling Alone (the book), there has been far greater acceptance of
the fact that we are less civicly engaged than a generation ago, and most of the stalwart critics of this hypothesis have come over to the view that we have civicly disengaged over the last generation. And one of the most recent gold-plated studies showed how dramatically our number of close confidantes has shriveled in just the past 20 year.
Is volunteering increasing?
Yes volunteering has been increasing over the last quarter century.
Nevertheless, it is important to look at this increase by age group.
More than all the increase is captured by those over age 60 whose
volunteering has exploded over the last 25 years (from slightly
over 6 times a year on average to well over 10). The vast middle
of the population (those 30-59 years of age) are actually slightly
less likely to be volunteering now than back in 1975. Finally there
is evidence that young Americans are slightly more likely
to be volunteering than a quarter century ago, even though roughly one-third of volunteering is required as a condition of graduation, and other young people volunteer to burnish their records for college admission. Nevertheless, this volunteering could have lifelong payoff since civic habits begin in youth.
With the exception of the volunteering uptick for Americans in college or younger, these patterns suggest that most of our volunteering spirit is being held up by the senior population (part of a
long civic generation that has been especially civic all their lives,
from when they were born in the 1920s and early 1930s all the way
through a Great Depression, two World Wars, and up to the current
day). Thus, we may be facing less of a Springtime of volunteering and
more of an Indian Summer of volunteering. Despite advances in modern
science, it is only a matter of time until the Grim Reaper removes
this population from the stage. And it will take very impressive
gains among the remaining parts of the population to make up for
their loss since the 30-59 year olds are only volunteering at 60%
the rate of the seniors, and the under 30 crowd is only volunteering
at 40% the rate of these seniors.
How does social capital compare with asset-based
development?
Much of what Kretzman and McKnight term “community assets” are
lodestones of social capital. There is obviously significant benefit
to their approach, in observing that all communities have social
capital assets on which they can build, and in helping communities
identify their community assets. It is also the case that many successful
grassroots organizing strategies, like the Industrial Areas Foundation,
have built upon already existing stores of social capital. Having
said this, we also think that it is important to examine whether
the amount of social capital in communities is increasing or decreasing,
and not to assume that simply because there are community assets,
that the stock of social capital is adequate, plentiful, or growing.
How social capital measurement compares
with sustainable development?
Sustainable development and sustainable communities typically measure
indicators that show the overall health of the community: i.e., looking
at measures of the economy, health, crime, in addition to human and
social capital levels. We completely agree that a community’s
stock of social capital is not the sole measure of a community’s
health. Nevertheless, we believe that social capital is important
in that it is a key driver for these other indicators (economy, health,
crime, etc.) rather than merely a goal in and of itself.
Is social capital building an end in itself
or a means to an end?
Often social capital building is not the central activity of a program:
a bowling league is about bowling not socializing, choral singing
is about music not forming social ties. The social capital built
is critical, but often considered incidental to those running such
programs. However, if something like a mentoring program is not building
social capital, it can’t be succeeding since building these
trusting ties is at the heart of what mentoring is all about. Social
capital measurement could be used either to see whether a mentoring
program is actually working, or to measure how much social capital
was being created by a program focused on something other than social
capital, such as a tutoring program. The measurement in the latter
case could be used to determine how to optimize the program so that
it achieves its goal of choral singing, tutoring, or soccer, at the
same time as it builds as much social capital as possible.
What is the role of government in all this?
Is government our curse or our salvation?
The field of social capital has attracted strange
bedfellows: folks on the political right who believe that if we just
got government off the backs of the average Joe, we could usher in
a civic rebirth, and folks on the political left who believe that
social capital building is a clarion call for a new activist role
of government.
We think there is no simple one-to-one relationship
between government and social capital. There are clear historical
examples where government directly caused a decline in social capital:
for example, the slum clearance programs in the late 1950s (from
which we are still paying the price), or even the rise of government
funding of kindergardens which caused an entire movement of supportive
and involved mothers to disappear. Conversely there are examples
that showcase how government has built more social capital or capitalized
on what existed: for example, the development of the county extension
service, the key role of postmasters general in curing polio through
the March of Dimes, etc. In fact, Prof. Theda Skocpol has written
that the postal service in general played a signal role in the nation's
early social capital building.
Moreover, if you compare across states or countries
of the world, places with a larger government per capita actually
have higher levels of social capital. It is hard to determine which
way the causation runs; it probably runs in both directions, but
if nothing else, it is inconvenient for those who like to demonize
the role of government. Probably what’s clear is that government
could be aided by a more thoughtful screen on whether government
programs are likely to augment or decrease the role of citizens.
Do the trends of social disengagement differ
by race?
Yes and no. The declines in social connectedness are an equal opportunity
employer. While levels of various forms of social capital differ
by race (e.g., religious observance is higher among blacks, and some
forms of civic engagement are higher among whites), the trends are
down among all races and social classes. More blacks are in the middle
class now than a generation ago, but the decline in civic involvement
is actually greater among college-educated blacks than in any other
group.
Does the social capital decline impact economic
classes differently?
Yes. Social capital is more important for poor people than for middle
and upper class Americans (who have more financial and human capital).
One legacy of slavery is a social capital deficit, especially in
bridging social capital. Thus the same objective collapse of social
capital has greater impact on the inner city than the suburbs, since
the inner city, as Prof. Xaver de Souza Briggs has noted, lacks bridging
social capital to the suburbs to enable it to “import clout” that
would connect the inner city with job opportunities, political influence,
access to capital, etc.
Resources on social capital
Our site has a lot of information about social capital on the what is social capital page, bibliography page, the in the news page, the interesting research page, the social capital research page, and the social capital factoids page.
There is a good PowerPoint overview of social capital through the Social Capital in Tampa Bay group.
If you are looking for more information, you could also look at:
The Social Capital Gateway (in Italy) has a fine site on social capital worldwide including recent books, theses, social capital events and conferences, basic readings on social capital.
The World Bank also has a strong site on social capital, with a searchable library about social capital articles.
Observatory Pascal often has links to new interesting research on social capital.
SOCIAL CAPITAL CARTOONS/ONE-LINERS:
- A tongue-in-cheek New Yorker cartoon on bridging social capital can be found here. ["It's Time to call in other people who don't know more but are just different.", 11/21/2005, p. 75)
- Group parallel action is not always enough. A Sam Gross cartoon shows a pack of wolves howling at
the moon. A wolf at the back turns to another and says, "My question is: Are we making an
impact?" (New Yorker, 8-5-91)
- And a famous 1993 cartoon about anonymity on the Internet in the New Yorker shows a dog explaining to another dog that no one knows you're a dog on the Internet.
- Mick Stevens New Yorker cartoon of man on train surrounded by cellphone users saying to woman seated next to him, "'Would you mind talking to me for a while, I forgot my cellphone" (9/9/02)
- Stan Hunt: Man coming home from work with bird on his head says to wife: "I made a new friend today.” (11/16/87)
- Or Steven Wright, indirectly on the Small World phenomenon: "It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
- if you've seen other social capital-related cartoons/jokes, please let us know about them.
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