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Social capital is a concept in business, economics, organizational behaviour, political science, public health, sociology and natural resources management that refers to connections within and between social networks. Though there are in fact a variety of inter-related definitions of this term, which have been described as "something of a cure-all"[1] for the problems of modern society, they tend to share the core idea "that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups".[2]
Contents
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1 Background 2 Evaluating social capital 3 Definitions, forms, and measurement 4 Roots o 4.1 Definitional issues o 4.2 Sub-types o 4.3 Measurement 5 Social capital and civil society 6 Social capital and education 7 Social capital and the Developing World 8 The argument that social capital may be negative 9 See also 10 References 11 External links
Background
The first known use of the concept was by L. J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West Virginia. Writing in 1916 Hanifan urged the importance of community involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of "social capital" to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to: those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit....The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself....If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community. The community as a whole will benefit by the coperation of all its parts, while the individual will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors.[2]
While various aspects of the concept have been approached by all social science fields, some trace the modern usage of the term to Jane Jacobs in the 1960s. However, she did not explicitly define a term social capital but used it in an article with a reference to the value of networks. Political scientist Robert Salisbury advanced the term as a critical component of interest group formation in his 1969 article "An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups" in the Midwest Journal of Political Science. Pierre Bourdieu used the term in 1972 in his Outline of a Theory of Practice,[3] and clarified the term some years later in contrast to cultural, economic, and symbolic capital. James Coleman adopted Glenn Loury's 1977 definition in developing and popularising the concept.[4] In the late 1990s the concept gained popularity, serving as the focus of a World Bank research programme and the main subject of several mainstream books, including Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.[2] The concept that underlies social capital has a much longer history; thinkers exploring the relation between associational life and democracy were using similar concepts regularly by the 19th century, drawing on the work of earlier writers such as James Madison (The Federalist Papers), Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) to integrate concepts of social cohesion and connectedness into the pluralist tradition in American political science. John Dewey may have made the first direct mainstream use of "social capital" in The School and Society in 1899, though he did not offer a definition.
levelling norms.[1] Here it is important to note the distinction between "bonding" vis--vis "bridging". There is currently no research which identifies the negative consequences of "bridging" social capital when in balance with its necessary antecedent, "bonding". Finally, social capital is often linked to the success of democracy and political involvement. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone makes the argument that social capital is linked to the recent decline in American political participation as well an increased tendency towards more conservative, right-wing politics.
According to Robert Putnam, social capital "refers to the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other".[citation needed] According to Putnam and his followers, social capital is a key component to building and maintaining democracy. Putnam says that social capital is declining in the United States. This is seen in lower levels of trust in government and lower levels of civic participation. Putnam also says that television and urban sprawl have had a significant role in making America far less 'connected'. Putnam believes that social capital can be measured by the amount of trust and "reciprocity" in a community or between individuals. Nan Lin's concept of social capital has a more individualistic approach: "Investment in social relations with expected returns in the marketplace". This may subsume the concepts of some others such as Bourdieu, Coleman, Flap, Putnam and Eriksson.[17] Francis Fukuyama described social capital as the existence of a certain (i.e. specific) set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them. Patrick Hunout and The Social Capital Foundation have suggested that social capital is a set of attitudes and mental dispositions that favour cooperation within society and that, as such, it equals the spirit of community. Nahapiet and Ghoshal in their examination of the role of social capital in the creation of intellectual capital, suggest that social capital should be considered in terms of three clusters: structural, relational and cognitive. Carlos Garca Timn describes that the structural dimensions of social capital relate to an individual ability to make weak and strong ties to others within a system. This dimension focusses on the advantages deverived from the configuration of an actor's, either individual or collective, network. The differences between weak and strong ties are explained by Granovetter (1973).[18] The relational dimension focuses on the character of the connection between individuals. This is best characterized through trust of others and their cooperation and the identification an individual has within a network. Hazleton and Kennan[19] added a third angle, that of communication. Communication is needed to access and use social capital through exchanging information, identifying problems and solutions, and managing conflict. According to Boisot[20] and Boland and Tensaki,[21] meaningful communication requires at least some sharing context between the parties to such exchange. The cognitive dimension focusses on the shared meaning and understanding that individuals or groups have with one another.
Roots
Definitional issues
The term "capital" is used by analogy with other forms of economic capital, as social capital is argued to have similar (although less measurable) benefits. However, the analogy with capital is misleading to the extent that, unlike traditional forms of capital, social capital is not depleted by use, but in fact depleted by non-use ("use it or lose it"). In this respect, it is similar to the now well-established economic concept of human capital.
Social Capital is also distinguished from the economic theory Social Capitalism. Social Capitalism as a theory challenges the idea that Socialism and Capitalism are mutually exclusive. Social-Capitalism posits that a strong social support network for the poor enhances capital output. By decreasing poverty, capital market participation is enlarged.
Sub-types
In his pioneering study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam wrote: "Henry Ward Beecher's advice a century ago to 'multiply picnics' is not entirely ridiculous today. We should do this, ironically, not because it will be good for America though it will be but because it will be good for us."[2] Putnam is not suggesting here that we must expand an already stable level of networking and civil interaction. He has found an overall decline in social capital in America over the past fifty years, a trend that may have significant implications for American society. Putnam speaks of two main components of the concept: bonding social capital and bridging social capital, the creation of which Putnam credits to Ross Gittel and Avis Vidal. Bonding refers to the value assigned to social networks between homogeneous groups of people and Bridging refers to that of social networks between socially heterogeneous groups. Typical examples are that criminal gangs create bonding social capital, while choirs and bowling clubs (hence the title, as Putnam lamented their decline) create bridging social capital. Bridging social capital is argued to have a host of other benefits for societies, governments, individuals, and communities; Putnam likes to note that joining an organization cuts in half an individual's chance of dying within the next year. The distinction is useful in highlighting how social capital may not always be beneficial for society as a whole (though it is always an asset for those individuals and groups involved). Horizontal networks of individual citizens and groups that enhance community productivity and cohesion are said to be positive social capital assets whereas self-serving exclusive gangs and hierarchical patronage systems that operate at cross purposes to societal interests can be thought of as negative social capital burdens on society. Social capital development on the internet via social networking websites such as Facebook or Myspace tends to be bridging capital according to one study, though "virtual" social capital is a new area of research. [22]
Measurement
There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which is one of its weaknesses. One can usually intuitively sense the level/amount of social capital present in a given relationship (regardless of type or scale), but quantitatively measuring it has proven somewhat complicated. This has resulted in different metrics for different functions. In measuring political social capital, it is common to take the sum of societys membership of its groups. Groups with higher membership (such as political parties) contribute more to the amount of capital than groups with lower membership, although many groups with low membership (such as communities) still add up to be significant. While it may seem that this is limited by
population, this need not be the case as people join multiple groups. In a study done by Yankee City,[23] a community of 17,000 people was found to have over 22,000 different groups. The level of cohesion of a group also affects its social capital.[citation needed] However, there is no one quantitative way of determining the level of cohesiveness, but rather a collection of social network models that researchers have used over the decades to operationalize social capital. One of the dominant methods is Ronald Burt's constraint measure, which taps into the role of tie strength and group cohesion. Another network based model is network transitivity. How a group relates to the rest of society also affects social capital, but in a different manner. Strong internal ties can in some cases weaken the groups perceived capital in the eyes of the general public, as in cases where the group is geared towards crime, distrust, intolerance, violence or hatred towards other. The Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia are examples of these kinds of organizations. See also the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey,[24] Putnam's online resource for data he uses in the book.
organisations of the third sector. This also implies "elements of the enlightenment use of the term civil society" including decency, respect, good manners and kindness to fellow beings. The idea that creating social capital (i.e. creating networks) will strengthen civil society underlies current Australian social policy aimed at bridging deepening social divisions. The goal is to reintegrate those marginalised from the rewards of the economic system into "the community". However, according to Onyx (2000), while the explicit aim of this policy is inclusion, its effects are exclusionary. Foley and Edwards[30] believe that "political systems...are important determinants of both the character of civil society and of the uses to which whatever social capital exists might be put".[5] Alessandrini agrees, saying, "in Australia in particular, neo-liberalism has been recast as economic rationalism and identified by several theorists and commentators as a danger to society at large because of the use to which they are putting social capital to work".[6] The resurgence of interest in "social capital" as a remedy for the cause of todays social problems draws directly on the assumption that these problems lie in the weakening of civil society. However this ignores the arguments of many theorists who believe that social capital leads to exclusion[citation needed] rather than to a stronger civil society. In international development, Ben Fine and John Harriss have been heavily critical of the inappropriate adoption of social capital as a supposed panacea (promoting civil society organisations and NGOs, for example, as agents of development) for the inequalities generated by neoliberal economic development.[31][32] An abundance of social capital is seen as being almost a necessary condition for modern liberal democracy. A low level of social capital leads to an excessively rigid and unresponsive political system and high levels of corruption, in the political system and in the region as a whole. Formal public institutions require social capital in order to function properly, and while it is possible to have too much social capital (resulting in rapid changes and excessive regulation), it is decidedly worse to have too little. A number of intellectuals in developing countries have argued that the idea of social capital, particularly when connected to certain ideas about civil society, is deeply implicated in contemporary modes of donor and NGO driven imperialism and that it functions, primarily, to blame the poor for their condition.[33] The concept of social capital in a Chinese social context has been closely linked with the concept of guanxi.
Morgan and Sorensen[35] however directly challenge Coleman for his lacking of an explicit mechanism to explain why Catholic schools students perform better than public school students on standardised tests of achievement.[36] Researching students in Catholic schools and public schools again, they propose two comparable models of social capital effect on mathematic learning. One is on Catholic schools as norm-enforcing schools whereas another is on public schools as horizon-expanding schools. It is found that while social capital can bring about positive effect of maintaining an encompassing functional community in norm-enforcing schools, it also brings about the negative consequence of excessive monitoring. Creativity and exceptional achievement would be repressed as a result. Whereas in horizon expanding school, social closure is found to be negative for student's mathematic achievement. These schools explore a different type of social capital, such as information about opportunities in the extended social networks of parents and other adults. The consequence is that more learning is fostered than norm-enforcing Catholic school students. In sum, Morgan and Sorensens (1999) study implies that social capital is contextualised, one kind of social capital may be positive in this setting but is not necessarily still positive in another setting. [35] Teachman et al.[37] further develop the family structure indicator suggested by Coleman. They criticise Coleman, who used only the number of parents present in the family, neglected the unseen effect of more discrete dimensions such as stepparents' and different types of singleparent families. They take into account of a detailed counting of family structure, not only with two biological parents or stepparent families, but also with types of single-parent families with each other (mother-only, father-only, never-married, and other). They also contribute to the literature by measuring parent-child interaction by the indicators of how often parents and children discuss school-related activities. In their journal article Beyond social capital: Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children, Sampson et al.[38] stress the normative or goal-directed dimension of social capital. They claim, "resources or networks alone (e.g. voluntary associations, friendship ties, organisational density) are neutral--- they may or may not be effective mechanism for achieving intended effect"[39] Zhou and Bankston[40] in their study of a Vietnamese community in New Orleans find that preserving traditional ethnic values enable immigrants to integrate socially and to maintain solidarity in an ethnic community surrounded by undesirable neighbourhoods. Ethnic solidarity is especially important in the context where immigrants just arrive in the host society. In her article Social Capital in Chinatown, Zhou examines how the process of adaptation of young Chinese Americans is affected by tangible forms of social relations between the community, immigrant families, and the younger generations.[41] Chinatown serves as the basis of social capital that facilitates the accommodation of immigrant children in the expected directions. Ethnic support provides impetus to academic success. Furthermore maintenance of literacy in native language also provides a form of social capital that contributes positively to academic achievement. Stanton-Salazar and Dornbusch[42] found that bilingual students were more likely to obtain the necessary forms of institutional support to advance their school performance and their life chances.
Maljoribanks and Kwok[43] conducted a survey in Hong Kong secondary schools with 387 fourteen-year-old students with an aim to analyse female and male adolescents differential educational achievement by using social capital as the main analytic tool. In that research, social capital is approved of its different effects upon different genders. In his thesis "New Arrival Students in Hong Kong: Adaptation and School Performance ", Hei Hang Hayes Tang argues that adaptation is a process of activation and accumulation of (cultural and social) capitals.[44] The research findings show that supportive networks is the key determinant differentiating the divergent adaptation pathways. Supportive networks, as a form of social capital, is necessary for activating the cultural capital the newly arrived students possessed. The amount of accumulated capital is also relevant to further advancement in the ongoing adaptation process. Putnam (2000) mentioned in his book Bowling Alone, "Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital" and continued "presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education".[45] According to his book these positive outcomes are the result of parent's social capital in a community. States where there is a high social capital there is a high Education performance.[46] Similarity of these states is that these states, parents were more associated with their children' education. When there are more parents' participation to their children' education and school, teachers have reported these engagements lower levels of students misbehavior, such as bringing weapons to school, engaging in physical violence, playing hooky, an being generally apathetic about education.[47] From these Putnam's arguments and evidents in order to find out relationship between social capital and education, one needs to consider amount of parents engagement to education and a school and existence of amount of social capital in a community. Borrowing Coleman's quotation from Putnam's book, Coleman once mentioned we cannot understate "the importance of the embeddedness of young persons in the enclaves of adults most proximate to them, first and most prominent the family and second, a surrounding community of adults".[48]
have such relationships to varying degrees. In Papua New Guinea, for example, the moka cycles, whereby which pigs are raised for distribution of pig meat in communal feasts are found widely through the Highlands, and the ability to organise and coordinate such events is a major way in which "bikmen" achieve social status. In Nigeria, local goat herders have such intense "bonding" social capital amongst themselves, due to frequent overnight camp-outs, that they miss out on "bridging" social capital with goat herders outside of the area, as they prefer late night barbecues.
See also
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Civil society Five Capitals Guanxi Liberal democracy Patrick Hunout Pierre Bourdieu Reed's law Robert Putnam The Social Capital Foundation
References
1. ^ a b c d Portes, A. (1998). Social Capital: its origins and applications in modern sociology Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1-24. 2. ^ a b c d Putnam, Robert. (2000), "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" (Simon and Schuster). 3. ^ Bourdiew, Pierre. (1972) Outline of a Theory of Practice 4. ^ Loury, Glenn (1977). A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences. Chapter 8 of Women, Minorities, and Employment Discrimination, Ed. P.A. Wallace and A. Le Mund. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books. 5. ^ a b c Foley, M. W. & Edwards, B. (1997). Escape from politics? 6. ^ a b c d Alessandrini, M. (2002). Is Civil Society an Adequate Theory? 7. ^ Arefi, M. (2003) Revisiting the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI): Lessons for Planners. Journal citation missing 8. ^ Halpern, D (2005) Social Capital Cambridge: Polity Press. p1-2 9. ^ Moran 2005 10. ^ Evans and Carson 2005 11. ^ Koka and Prescott 2002 12. ^ McGrath and Sparks 2005 13. ^ 1993 14. ^ Uzzi and Dunlap 2005 15. ^ Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). The Forms of Capital. 16. ^ Bourdieu, Pierre. (1983). "konomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital" in Soziale Ungleichheiten (Soziale Welt, Sonderheft 2), edited by Reinhard Kreckel. Goettingen: Otto Schartz & Co. pp. 249 17. ^ as noted in Lin, Nan (2001). Social Capital, Cambridge University Press 18. ^ Granovetter, M. S. (1973). "The Strength of Weak Ties", American Journal of Sociology 78 (6), pp 1360 - 1380. 19. ^ Hazleton and Kennan (2000) 20. ^ Boisot, M. (1995) Information space: A framework for learning in organizations, institutions and culture, London, Routledge 21. ^ Boland and Tensaki (1995) 22. ^ Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007)
23. ^ W. Lloyd Warner, J.O. Low, Paul S. Lunt, & Leo Srole (1963). Yankee City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 24. ^ The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey 25. ^ Cox in Alessandrini (2002) 26. ^ Schmidt in Alessandrini (2002) 27. ^ Walzer (1992) 28. ^ Lyons (2001). Third Sector. 29. ^ Onyx (2000) 30. ^ Foley and Edwards (1997) 31. ^ Fine, Ben. (2001). Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-24179-0. 32. ^ Harriss, J. (2001). Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital. Leftword/Anthem/Stylus. 33. ^ For instance see David Moore's edited book 'The World Bank', University of KwaZuluNatal Press, 2007 34. ^ Coleman and Hoffer (1987) "High School and Beyond" 35. ^ a b Morgan and Sorensen (1999) 36. ^ Chen (2002) 37. ^ Teachman et al. (1996) 38. ^ Sampson; et al. (1999). "Beyond social capital: Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children". 39. ^ Sampson et al., 1999, p.635, quoted by Chen, 2002 40. ^ Zhou and Bankston (1998) 41. ^ Zhou (2000) 42. ^ Stanton-Salazar (1995) (quoted by Wong, 2002) 43. ^ Maljoribanks and Kwok (1998) 44. ^ "New Arrival Students in Hong Kong: Adaptation and School Performance ", Hei Hang Hayes Tang (2002) 45. ^ Putnam (2000), p. 296 46. ^ Putnam (2000), p.300 47. ^ Putnam (2000), p. 301 48. ^ Putnam (2000), p. 303 49. ^ Woolcock, M (1998), " Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework" {Theory and Society, Springer Netherlands, Volume 27, Number 2 / April, 1998P pps 151-208 50. ^ Knack, Stephen & Keefer, Philip (1997), "Does Social Capital Have An Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation" (Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1997, Vol. 112, No. 4), pps 1251-1288 51. ^ Bolin, B., Hackett, E.J., Harlan, S.L., Kirby, A., Larsen, L., Nelson, A., Rex, T.R., Wolf., S. (2004) Bonding and Bridging: Understanding the Relationship between Social Capital and Civic Action. Journal of Planning Education and Research 24:64-77
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Becker, Gary S. (1996). Accounting for Tastes. Part I: Personal Capital; Part II: Social Capital. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54357-2.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. (1983). "konomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital" in Soziale Ungleichheiten (Soziale Welt, Sonderheft 2), edited by Reinhard Kreckel. Goettingen: Otto Schartz & Co. pp. 183-98. Coleman, James (1988). "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital", American Journal of Sociology. 94 Supplement: (pp. S95-S-120), abstract. Dasgupta, Partha, and Serageldin, Ismail, ed. (2000). Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. (book preview except pp. 217-401, 403-25) Edwards, B. & Foley, M. W. (1998). Civil society and social capital beyond Putnam Everingham, C. (2001). Reconstituting Community Allen J. SCOTT (2008) The Social Economy of the Metropolis, Oxford University Press.
External links
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Social Capital Gateway, Resources for the study of social capital Social Capital Theory - Detailed review of social capital, particularly social capital for social action. Saguaro Seminar primer on social capital World Bank's PovertyNet page on social capital Lin N., 2001, Building a Network Theory of Social Capital Social Capital Inc., an organization dedicated to increasing social capital in local communities New Papers on Social Capital, a Newsletter edited by the RePEc Project Social Capital & Collective Intelligence Forum at openbc moderated by George Pr, Carlos Garca Timn, Fernanda Ibarra and John Lindsay. Social Capital Theory in the Context of Japanese Children, article by Cherylynn Bassani in the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, 8 May 2003. A Comparison of Social Capital Between Parents in Single and Two Parent Families in Japan, article by Cherylynn Bassani in the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, 5 July 2007. Five Dimensions of Social Capital Theory as they Pertain to Youth Studies, article by Cherylynn Bassani in the Journal of Youth Studies 10, 1 2007. Assist Social Capital, Working to Promote Best Practice in the Development of Social Capital Can Social Capital Explain Persistent Poverty Gaps? from the National Poverty Center Ethnicity as Social Capital Social Capital within Ethnic Communities Social capital, quality of life, and Internet and mobile phone use Collection of best Social Capital blogs by Heather Ross