Race, Neighborhoods, and the Misuse of Social Capital

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Race, Neighborhoods, and the Misuse of Social Capital

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Race, Neighborhoods, and the Misuse of Social Capital

Edited by James Jennings

RACE, NEIGHBORHOODS, AND THE MISUSE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL Copyright © James Jennings, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9–781–4039–8076–2 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8076–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Race, neighborhoods, and the misuse of social capital / edited by James Jennings. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-8076-4 1. Social capital (Sociology)—United States. 2. Social capital (Sociology)—Nova Scotia—Halifax. 3. Social capital (Sociology)—New Zealand. 4. Urban poor— United States. 5. Urban poor—Nova Scotia—Halifax. 6. Urban poor—New Zealand. 7. Community development—United States. 8. Community development—Nova Scotia—Halifax. 9. Community development—New Zealand. 10. United States—Social policy—1993- I. Jennings, James, 1949- II. Title. HM708.R33 2007 307.3'416089—dc22 2006032379 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Preface Louise Simmons

vii

Introduction James Jennings

1

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

Race, Social Relations, and the Study of Social Capital Lisa García Bedolla

7

Old Whines in New Bottles: Robert Putnam, Richard Florida, and the “Community” Problem in Contemporary America Daniel J. Monti, Jr.

21

Social Capital, the Sow’s Ear, and the Closing of the Political Universe Stephen Samuel Smith and Jessica Kulynych

41

Moving Beyond Vagueness: Social Capital, Social Networks, and Economic Outcomes Russell Williams

67

Social Capital, Race, and the Future of InnerCity Neighborhoods James Jennings

87

Social Capital in Refugee and Immigrant Communities David Turcotte and Linda Silka

109

From Africville to Globalville: Race, Poverty, and Urban Governance in Halifax, Nova Scotia Karen Bridgett Murray

133

VI CONTENTS

8.

The Political Use of Social Capital in New Zealand Richard Davis

145

Bibliography

157

Contributors

171

Index

175

Preface

or those of us who have been reluctant to climb aboard the social capital bandwagon during the past decade, this volume validates our discomfort at seeing this construct superimposed on efforts to deal with urban problems and the needs of under-resourced local communities. The chapters ahead provide a comprehensive and meticulous critique of social capital—its theoretical and conceptual foundations— and an analysis of how it doesn’t necessarily work as the underpinning of solutions for the problems of marginalized populations. The contributors demonstrate convincingly that the notion of social capital ignores or glosses over economic and political dynamics that give rise to inequality. In addition, it embodies political and linguistic assumptions that need to be disentangled and reassessed if we truly wish to address social injustices. Given the popularity of social capital and the tacit acceptance of assumptions embodied in this construct, this volume is a welcome contribution to contemporary social policy discourse. For social capital has currency not only in the academic community, it has also been adopted by policymakers and those in philanthropic, community organizing, or advocacy activities, who perhaps uncritically advance the acquisition of social capital by the disenfranchised as a program goal. Hopefully these chapters can help reframe priorities and reassess how best to achieve equity-oriented goals. For readers who continue to draw on the idea of social capital in their endeavors, the lessons of this volume can be helpful in overcoming its limitations. This anthology continues a long debate over the nature of poverty and inequality, particularly in the U.S. context and, interestingly, increasingly in an international context, as several chapters reveal. Where do we locate the causes—in the individual, the family, or the community, or the social, political, and economic forces that impact these components of society? What are the most effective solutions? What role should the public sector play? How much should we expect

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VIII PREFACE

from government in solving poverty? These questions and debates resound through recent periods and endure within policy discourse. Thankfully, James Jennings and the other outstanding contributors have provided a new weapon and a much-needed perspective in this struggle. Louise Simmons University of Connecticut

Introduction James Jennings

he idea of social capital has had an enormous impact in influencing theories and strategies about resolving poverty. It has been incorporated in public policies, as well as private foundation grantmaking that focuses on poverty and local neighborhood revitalization. Unfortunately, in the latter case, social capital has not been thoroughly scrutinized as the basis for resolving racial and spatial inequality. A wide range of researchers, foundation representatives, and government officials simply praise the wonders of social capital and thereby discourage serious critique about how this concept can actually resolve— or not resolve—social and economic inequality in local places. Worse, this chorus has encouraged the adoption of public policies that ultimately weaken low-income and working-class neighborhoods in cities and also, ironically, weaken civic participation aimed at challenging such policies and related strategies. This anthology focuses on four key questions related to race, neighborhoods, and social capital. First, how is social capital presented or discussed within contexts of racial and spatial inequality? How does this idea inform public policy, research regarding neighborhood revitalization, or local economic development? Related to this question, is the building—or utilization—of social capital an effective alternative to class or neighborhood-based political mobilization in struggles and conflict aimed at achieving equity? And, finally, what kinds of political and economic strategies can be proposed to ensure that all people and communities have access to basic economic benefits and opportunities– regardless of the “stock of social capital”? In response to these questions, the essays in this collection reveal theoretical and conceptual weaknesses of social capital as a resource for meeting the economic needs associated with impoverished and

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2 RACE, NEIGHBORHOODS, AND THE MISUSE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

low-income communities in the urban United States, as well as in other nations. The contributors also rely on historical analysis and empirical evidence to show the limitations of the concept of social capital for understanding and responding to racial and spatial inequality. The authors challenge the idea that the language and discourse of social capital is an explanation and diagnosis for racial and spatial inequality in urban neighborhoods. The contributors identify a major problem with the public discourse and research related to social capital in that it is presented devoid of historical context. Specifically, the role of social capital in U.S. history, for example, or its role in the development of institutional racism and sexism, is overlooked by many scholars. Social capital as a glue to exploit communities in earlier periods, or to enable such communities to resist racial democracy (as was the case with White civic associations in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond, in the urban United States) becomes irrelevant within a historical context. This limitation allows for the erroneous presentation of social capital emerging uniformly in different racial and ethnic communities. Implicit in this idea is the presumption that racial inequality is irrelevant or insignificant today. This kind of presentation also tends to render invisible the struggles of poor people against institutional injustice—including the victories of poor people and the violence directed against them. In other words, a reading of the racial and political history of the United States raises questions about contemporary concerns regarding the apparent absence of social capital in some communities, and it counters the notions that social networks and trust in relation to objective economic conditions can be analyzed in the absence of a framework of power and racial analysis. Another concern discussed by the authors is that social capital is essentially a behavioral idea, and as such it points to civic responses to problems like poverty, joblessness, crime, and local economic distress in urban places that overlook structural explanations. The building of social capital is proposed as a response to these kinds of challenges. The need for political mobilization on the part of interests that lack wealth or power is not considered part of the social capital agenda. In much of the extant literature on social capital and low-income communities of color there is a presumption that there is a lack of civic participation, or concern about civic issues, on the part of the residents. A variant of this point of view is the accompanying presumption that highly impoverished neighborhoods have few economic resources that can be utilized on behalf of the residents. Loic J. D. Wacquant refers to this package of presumptions as a “pernicious premise” that “has become

INTRODUCTION 3

embedded in the paradigm of many researchers who study and write about poor and predominantly Black urban communities.” While this premise has been discredited by a few urban researchers, this “profile in defect—is deeply entrenched in American social science.” The pernicious premise described by Wacquant leads to the call for building social capital in inner-city communities. The essential question in this kind of discussion is how to encourage the building of a stock of social capital in impoverished communities. Realization of this possibility will lead to citizens organizing on the basis of mutual interests and trusts aimed at improving collective living conditions and an increased capacity for resolving a range of neighborhood problems. The language and discourse of social capital is associated with policy initiatives that serve to de-politicize poor and working-class interests in society. Such public policies include so-called “welfare reform” in the United States, as well as the popular call among some researchers to “deconcentrate” poverty in certain places. While the rhetoric of these policy strategies seem benign, in fact there is a perception of low-income and working-class people as deficient in terms of the work ethic, or motivation to improve one’s social and economic status in life, and that this is why they remain poor. An essential and underlying idea of these kinds of public policies is that poor people and children must be exposed to normal, middle-class values and living styles so that they can have models upon which to improve their status. This is one way of building or encouraging social capital. While social capital is presented as beneficial in improving the lives of poor people in urban areas, it is actually functional for the management of urban space on behalf of corporate agendas and interests. An important critique of some of the contributors is that this idea facilitates politics that benefit powerful institutional players and that are aimed at acquiring land deemed valuable by corporate elites. Emphasizing the importance of attracting a middle class, or a creative class, to re-settle in urban areas has emerged as a strategy for neighborhood revitalization. This strategy is partially justified by claiming that these new residents bring into urban communities something that was previously lacking: social capital. Thus, government and corporate partnerships should provide support to strategies that encourage professionals to return to cities. Of course, the fact that this same partnership is responsible for the policies and practices that led to the impoverishment of urban places is conveniently overlooked. The anthology begins with a historical essay by political scientist Lisa García Bedolla. The author argues that social capital has been a glue or


tool used in the oppression of racial and ethnic minorities. Reminiscing about the loss of social capital becomes romantic if this fact is overlooked. Bedolla provides important examples in U.S. history showing the ugly and racist side of social capital. This is a point that she says cannot be ignored in current analysis. Sociologist Daniel J. Monti, Jr., continues the overall critique by focusing on the theoretical and empirical limitations of the idea of social capital and how it is applied to the suggestion that a creative class can save inner-city neighborhoods. He utilizes a methodological challenge to the works by Robert Putnam and Richard Florida to show the limitations of this concept as applied to neighborhood revitalization in U.S. urban society. He reminds the reader, furthermore, that human beings have always reminisced about the “good ole days,” but this should not drive public policy today. Stephen S. Smith and Jessica Kulyncyh show how questions of politics and power are removed from discussions of social capital. They illustrate how language and symbolism associated with social capital becomes a political tool to dampen class-based challenges to structural inequality. Interestingly, focusing on the need to build social networks as a tool for improving living conditions becomes a way to stifle civic discourse that questions inequality in U.S. society. They utilize this approach to critique how some organizations, such as the Industrial Areas Foundation, pursue community building today. According to economist Russell Williams, while social capital is emphasized in the economic development literature, it is the idea of “social networks” that can lead to meaningful public policies that address the effects of structural inequality such as poverty, unemployment, and joblessness in inner-city areas. He believes that the latter is more useful for explaining and responding to inequality. Williams discusses theoretical weaknesses inherent in the term social capital but begins with the fact that social capital can mean different things for different groups in society. Emphasizing social networks, or the actual relationships that individuals have with others and that are linked directly or indirectly to institutions, allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the basis and perpetuation of inequality or certain economic behaviors. In the next chapter, I argue that the language of social capital is consistent with a political economy that favors powerful corporate agendas. Social capital justifies and facilitates a pro-growth logic that benefits corporations and wealthy interests over those of low-income and workingclass neighborhoods. I use the example of low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods to show the inaccuracy of applying a social capital lens to understand the challenges facing these communities. I propose that

INTRODUCTION 5

an urban politics aimed at expanding social and economic democracy for the benefit of all people must challenge corporate agendas that are unaccountable to the well-being of the general public. Thus, the key issue for building local democracy is not the particular stock of social capital, but rather the capacity for local groups to change conditions of spatial and racial inequality and challenge the political and policy domination of corporate power. The essay by sociologists David Turcotte and Linda Silka helps to illustrate the inconsistency between the call for social capital on the part of government and its private-sector partners and the lack of support for tapping impressive networks of social trust and cooperation among new immigrant groups. Immigrant communities are lauded for their stock of social capital by researchers, media, and government. Yet, Turcotte and Silka provide a comprehensive case study of Asian-descent immigrant groups showing that government ignores its own rhetoric by not assisting these same communities in resolving obstacles to more successful economic activities. This is but one example where communities can be rich in social capital, yet, through government inattention or via economic development models adopted by government in partnership with powerful private interests, diluted in the capacity to improve their situation. Indeed, praising immigrant groups for their stock of social capital while continuing policies and practices of institutions that undermine economic opportunities is not only a paradox but an excuse for government inattentiveness to the needs of these groups. This reader includes two selections focusing on urban and low-income neighborhoods outside the United States, which serves to show how the discussions raised by the contributors are global. Political scientist Karen Bridgett Murray uses the case of Halifax, Canada to show how public policies have segregated parts of this city and created racial differences in the living conditions of White and Black Canadians. The dislocation of a once-thriving Black community—rich with social capital—produced a need for human services in response to the social and economic needs of residents. Today, the idea of social capital provides a justification to place greater pressures on nonprofits to provide human services without increasing resources in these places. However, social capital neutralizes nonprofits’ efforts to engage in strategies aimed at challenging the causes of social and economic inequality. Richard Davis, a member of the Churches’ Agency on Social Issues in New Zealand, proposes that social capital has been used similarly in New Zealand. In his short but powerful analysis based on one of his public lectures, he shows that this concept became an ideological and political tool


on the part of that nation’s New Right to disestablish the welfare state and push privatization in the New Zealand economy. Although the rhetoric of social capital was initially utilized by conservatives, the Labour Party of New Zealand has adopted it to rationalize social service cutbacks, thereby undermining nonprofit organizations, a phenomenon similarly described by Murray. Davis analyzes the speeches of a former prime minister and shows that the call for social capital was consistently associated with calls for reducing social services and elevating the potential use of the free market to respond to the needs of people. We hope that this collection of essays helps to expand the civic and political debates about social capital by questioning the conceptual disconnection of this idea from the continuing existence and growing structural inequalities in our societies. More importantly, we hope these essays can help to challenge public policies that ignore the voices (and histories) and needs of poor and working-class people and all residents of urban neighborhoods who have suffered from years of neglect by the government and irresponsible actions of powerful corporations.

Chapter 1

Race, Social Relations, and the Study of Social Capital Lisa García Bedolla

ew social scientists ever generate the attention or controversy that Robert Putnam has since he first made his social capital argument in 1993.1 In Making Democracy Work, Putnam argued that political differences between northern and southern Italy could be explained by differences in political culture, particularly social capital, between the two regions. In recent work, Putnam applies this social capital model to the United States; he argues that declines in social capital go a long way toward explaining increasing voter apathy and decreasing civic engagement among Americans. This article raised a stream of controversy and political debate, much of which Putnam responded to with his book, Bowling Alone.2 While Putnam addresses his critics in this work, the central argument remains the same: since the mid-1960s political trust, social connectedness, and civic activity has declined precipitously in the United States, and that the root explanation for this decline lies in the generational differences between Americans born after World War II and those born before. There have been many criticisms of Putnam’s argument, the bulk of which we will not get into here.3 Yet, even these critics still, to a large extent, use Putnam’s model as their point of departure. For that reason, it is useful to consider Putnam’s work on its own terms. In so doing, we make two assumptions. First, that Putnam is correct: that social capital as a whole is declining in the United States. Second, that the social capital model is useful: that increasing community-level social capital may

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serve as a way to increase people’s civic engagement and counteract the negative effects of low socioeconomic status. The latter could be especially useful when considering the civic engagement of members of marginal groups. So the question becomes: if we accept these two factors, is there any way to improve Putnam’s model? We argue that there is. Our basic argument is that Putnam’s individual-level focus ignores the role social relations play in the structure and function of social capital in the United States. How Putnam addresses the role of race, in particular, highlights the larger theoretical problem underlying his analysis. What do we mean by social relations? Emirbayer defines the study of social relations as analysis that focuses on trans-action versus interaction. He argues that in a relational analysis, “the very terms or units involved . . . derive their meaning, significance, and identity from (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction.”4 As a result, he says, “things” can only exist in relation to one another and can never be treated as “given” in isolation.”5 Thus, “individual persons . . . are inseparable from the transactional contexts within which they are embedded.”6 Emirbayer goes on to argue that one of the problems with standard statistical models in social science is that they assume that independent variables remain fixed and unchanging as they “bounce” off one another.7 In these models it is assumed that the independent variables “act upon” the dependent variables but that none of the factors are actually changed or affected by that interaction. More importantly, the larger sociohistorical context within which the entire interaction is embedded is often not present or accounted for in such models. While these limitations are a problem for all social science research, they are especially problematic within the context of studies of social capital, and their effects are most visible when considering the issue of race. Race, Social Relations, and Social Capital Putnam defines social capital as “features of social life—networks, norms, and trust—that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives.”8 He emphasizes the connected aspect of social capital, that it refers to “social connections and the attendant norms and trust” and therefore is about our “relations with one another” and people’s “connections with the life of their communities.”9 His argument presumes that “the more we connect with other people, the more we trust them, and vice versa.”10 So, for Putnam, what matters are those activities that lead people to develop deeper and more meaningful relations with one

RACE, SOCIAL RELATIONS, AND THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CAPITAL 9

another. That, then, serves as the foundation for other kinds of political activity and/or membership. It is this relational aspect of social capital that deserves further scrutiny in how it relates to issues of race. Many scholars have criticized Putnam for his lack of focus on race. According to McClain, “most analyses of social capital do not confront the conditions or contingencies associated with race . . . and do not recognize that what might be positively related to social capital for Whites may in fact be negatively related for blacks.”11 Similarly, Portney and Berry contend that “the debate about social capital and civic engagement largely concentrates on White, middle-class America.”12 Hero also argues, “social capital studies . . . focus almost entirely on aggregate outcomes and absolute gains.”13 As such, Hero challenges Putnam’s measures of social capital in that neither the social capital index nor the civic equality index are “disaggregated according to race.”14 In response to these criticisms, Putnam acknowledges “the decline in social connectedness began just after the successes of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.”15 He believes this may be due to “a kind of sociological ‘White flight,’ as legal desegregation of civic life led Whites to withdraw from community associations.”16 However, he does not believe that race is an issue in social capital because “the erosion of social capital . . . has affected all races.” In fact, during the 1980s the downturns in both joining and trusting were even greater among African Americans (and other racial minorities). So, for Putnam, race is only an issue insofar as Whites leave newly integrated community associations and where there are appreciable differences in social capital among the races. Since Whites are not the only group with decreasing social capital, he does not believe that racial issues are a significant part of this story. This formulation, like that of most political scientists looking at race, treats race as an independent variable. In other words, it questions whether or not individuals who identify themselves as members of a particular race behave in ways that are different from those who identify themselves as being of another race. Race here serves only as a descriptor for a particular group of people. As Emirbayer cautions, the actual dynamics attached to the race descriptor are located outside the model. As a result, the social connectedness and attitudes that likely relate directly to racial identification are not present in the analysis.17 What Putnam is measuring is the effect of race as a biological category, rather than as a social one. For Putnam, since the decline he is measuring is present among Whites and racialized groups, then race in and of itself is not an explanatory factor.


But what if we see the construction of race and of American social and political institutions as fundamentally racialized? Smith points out that “American racial identities have gained much of their practical reality from their institutionalization by political elites in laws, public policies, and governmental programs.”18 In addition, Smith also tells us that, historically, U.S. citizenship in particular has been defined in ascriptive terms, terms that through most of our history excluded women and people of color. He goes on to say that many Americans “defined their core political identities in terms of their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and culture” and “warred passionately . . . against every force and faction that threatened to give the U.S. citizenry a different cast.”19 Smith calls his work a “basic reinterpretation of American political culture,” one that places race at the center of American identity and civic life. This ascriptive understanding of who was an American has had important social, political, and economic repercussions. Our housing markets, driven by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), routinely discriminated against African American and Latino buyers, encouraging racial segregation and ensuring that new suburban developments were almost universally middle class and White.20 Our schools, north and south, were segregated by race. Higher education and professional employment were largely closed to people of color. And many of the civic organizations Putnam mentions—the Kiwanis, the Rotary Club, and others—banned the participation of both women and people of color. If social capital is about building relationships within communities, these racially-biased programs have had an important effect on what communities looked like and who (racially) was allowed to live in them. It makes intuitive sense, then, that race and race policies are intimately related to the creation and maintenance of community-level social capital in the United States. However, we do not have to rely on intuition to say that this is true. Sociologists looking at social networks have found that, even in the present day, American social networks are highly homogenous.21 This is true in terms of race and political ideology.22 In a national probability sample in the 1980s, Marsden finds that only eight percent of Americans report having significant primary-level interactions with individuals of another race.23 This was reported, of course, during a period of integration. So what can reports of social homophily tell us? Mainly, that race is still an important factor for people in determining with whom they can feel comfortable and with whom they want to spend time. It seems logical, then, that race would affect a person’s feelings of attachment to his or her community and the ways he or she might want to act upon that attachment. In other words, racial customs and attitudes are intimately related


to the development of social connections that Putnam sees as crucial to the creation and maintenance of social capital. If we believe that race still plays this role in American society, what would our causal story look like in order to explain the declines Putnam reports? One option is to imagine that the end of segregation, and the resulting upheaval, in fact made social capital more difficult to create and maintain within communities. This should not in any way be seen as an argument in support of segregation. What I am saying is that the social, political, legal, and economic shifts that came out of the civil rights movement constituted a far more significant challenge to “traditional” American civic life than is generally acknowledged in the social capital literature. Put another way, for the first time in American history Whites were faced with the possibility of living next to, working with, and attending school with people of other races. Studies of hate crimes and evolving White racial attitudes suggest that desegregation represented a significant change in how politics and American society were organized, a change that often caused hostility and feelings of dislocation on the part of Whites.24 Conversely, racial communities lost feelings of cohesion as middle class members were enabled to leave the segregated community and move into the suburbs. These changes are an important, and largely ignored, part of the social capital story. The foregoing argument is different from those that criticize Putnam for ignoring the role played by the 1960s social movements in causing changes in social capital. Conceivably, the stock of social capital could have declined due to political and ideological attacks on government programs and policies that provided a basis for social capital. This is only part of the story, however. The political upheaval of the 1960s likely played an important role, not just because of the role of the New Right, but because the civil rights movement reflected a larger political upheaval that began after World War II. Until World War II, U.S. national identity had been openly based on being White and Christian. Eugenics arguments regarding the effects of the “Teutonic gene” on the capacity for democracy were the subject of Congressional speeches and debate. Many prominent Americans, including Henry Ford, initially supported Adolf Hitler’s race project. After the war, however, things changed.25 Fighting fascism made it more difficult to support similar racial projects at home. The political organizing that began in the late 1940s and 1950s were in fact the beginning of what would become the civil rights movement.26 This historical change might be the watershed that explains Putnam’s generational story; it may be that Americans born after World War II are


less civically involved because World War II marks a significant shift in the definition of what it means to be an American, and, by extension, part of the American social, economic, and political community. For the first time in U.S. history Whiteness was no longer a prerequisite for inclusion in the fabric of American society. That fabric needed to be rewoven, and it remains unclear how those colors will fit together. The resulting ambiguity regarding what constitutes the American community could be an important reason why Putnam finds such a change in the post-World War II generation. For children born after that period, the definition of “peoplehood” could no longer be, for the first time, an openly racial one.27 Recognizing the racialized nature of American “peoplehood” also provides important insights into American associational membership and collective activity. Social capital theorists like Putnam insufficiently analyze the meaning and motivation behind associational membership. This point is related to the general criticism that Putnam does not differentiate among organizations.28 However, I believe it is more important to consider what collective activity means in the first place, particularly in relation to American civic identity. I mention above the important changes in the shape and context of American identity brought about by the social movements of the 1960s. It follows logically that these changes would have had an effect on organizational memberships as well. This is because collective activity requires that the participant have some attachment to, or stake in, that collective entity. Within this context, the nature and function of the collective is not an issue. What is an issue is why individuals choose to act in that collective. Mancur Olsen would argue that collective action is irrational—it is much easier for a person to free ride.29 However, as Monroe points out, individuals regularly act altruistically.30 In addition, social movement theorists have shown the importance of what they call mobilizing (collective) identities to participation in those movements.31 This suggests that a purely instrumental view of collective activity provides only part of the picture. The other part of the picture is that collective action has two purposes—to work toward some shared objective, and to validate and reinforce the participants’ collective identity(ies), however defined.32 So, associational membership is likely, in and of itself, some sort of expression of the participants’ collective identities. Given the prominence of race in U.S. history, it is highly likely that racial self-understanding is an important part of why individuals join organizations. It also helps these individuals determine which organizations to join. This vision of the


underlying meaning of collective organization is absent from the social capital literature. Toward a Racially Inclusive Theory of Social Capital I am not arguing that the concept of social capital be thrown out completely. Putnam’s work, and that of other social capital theorists, has raised important questions about the role of context and community in civic engagement. This work complements and enhances traditional political science studies of political behavior. If the social capital arguments are true, building community-level social capital may be a way for marginalized communities to circumvent the limitations created by socioeconomic status and to become more politically engaged. What I am calling for is the development of a social capital framework that takes more seriously the role of social relations and the ways that race informs collective social organization in the United States. Such a framework needs to contain three factors: (1) it must incorporate race as constitutive of American social and political life, not simply as an independent variable; (2) it must take context seriously, in terms of community history, current racial inequality, and opportunities for civic engagement; and (3) it must consider the role gatekeepers play in determining the potential connections people can make. I discuss each in turn. Race as Endogenous Rather than Exogenous Smith points out the limitations of considering race as an independent variable rather than as an explicitly political creation.33 The main problem with the independent variable approach is that it makes race exogenous to the model. In other words, whatever movement or change is caused by the race category occurs outside the model. In addition, we must also consider what the race variable (most often measured as a dummy) is actually measuring. All the dummy tells us is that a particular respondent considers themselves part of that racial group. We have no idea what level of identification, or “linked fate,” that individual has with the larger group.34 We also have no idea what kinds of collective experiences and feelings of social or group stigma are attached to that identification, both of which have been found to affect feelings of selfesteem and psychological well-being among members of marginalized groups.35 At the very least, considering the ways race has permeated American social, political, economic, and legal institutions, we need to


do a better job of incorporating the relational and social aspects of race into our analyses. To do so, we need to develop better and more multifaceted measures of collective identity. Social psychologists have been trying to develop such a measure, one that does not focus on personal identity (as current political science measures do) but rather on people’s feelings of stigma and attachment to their social group(s).36 One of the main problems with these frameworks is that they often fail to incorporate an individual’s attachment to multiple social groups (i.e., race and gender). Ideally, these indices could be adjusted to take that into account. These models are limited in that they still, to some extent, essentialize what are dynamic and fluid identifications; however, getting a better sense of how feelings of “linked fate” affect attitudes and activities, particularly within stigmatized communities, could be an important move toward developing a better understanding of how race continues to affect American collective activity, even in the post-civil rights era.37 This should also allow us to begin to see how these feelings of stigma and group attachment affect the levels of activity, and kinds of organizations, individuals choose to engage in, thus deepening our understanding of the role that race and social stigma play in social capital development. At the very least, we could improve the way we conceptualize and measure these kinds of questions. Finally, this new framework would have to take seriously the longterm impact segregation has had on the development of American communities and social networks. Racially, American social networks remain highly homogenous. Martha Menchaca calls this phenomenon “social apartness”—the tendency for de facto segregation to exist even after de jure segregation ends.38 As social scientists we need to be aware that this homogeneity within social networks can exist in an ostensibly racially-integrated setting. Given that Putnam’s model of social capital directly relates to feelings of social connectedness, it is important to develop measures that explore racial integration within social networks. It is also important to take into consideration the role race plays in levels of social trust and in how people define the community for which they choose to act collectively. The Role of Context Most work on social capital in marginal communities focuses on the impact that structural factors have on levels of civic engagement. These structural factors affect the way in which racial communities can and do


participate in social capital-generating organizations. I would suggest that a neighborhood’s racial and economic heterogeneity are key factors for deploying and analyzing social capital in marginal communities. Recent work by Hero indicates that racial context is an important factor when measuring levels of social capital. Hero finds a strong relationship among inequality, heterogeneity, and social capital. Studying Black and White differences, both within states and across states, Hero finds that ratios of civic engagement within states have an inverse relationship with race. He observes that more unequal and racially heterogeneous communities have less social capital, while more homogeneous communities have more. Within states “civic equality (i.e., the ratio of Black to White registration and turnout) is lower in states with high aggregate levels of capital . . . Social capital is associated with lower, not higher, relative civic equality regarding race.”39 Comparing rates across the states, Hero notes that “(h)igher levels of social capital do not go along with high rates of Black voter registration across states . . . But social capital is significantly related to White voter registration rates”40 (emphasis added). The differences Hero finds between Black and White social capital again highlights the importance of race in our understanding of capital. The main point, according to Hero, is that “[s]ocial capital and civic culture are negatively and substantially related to racial and ethnic diversity in the states.”41 So, as I argue, it seems that social capital is easier to develop in racially homogenous communities. Thus, levels of racial homogeneity and inequality need to be part of any social capital model. In addition, structural factors have been found to have important effects on resources in particular neighborhood contexts. Portney and Berry believe “it is clear that a central issue in determining the public’s involvement in community life is how the opportunities to participate are structured.”42 For them, “the participation rates of low socioeconomic status (SES) residents in predominantly African American neighborhoods is almost twice that of low SES residents of low minority population neighborhoods.”43 Conversely, neighborhoods with low minority populations show lower levels of participation in neighborhood associations and lower levels of community. Similarly, Alex-Assensoh contends “the idea that social capital and civic engagement are primarily the result of individual factors is belied by mounting and convincing evidence, which shows that structural factors affect engagement in civic and political life.”44 Her study measures the impact that community context has on levels of social capital of both Blacks and Whites in five Ohio cities. Focusing on the poverty density and the racial composition of the neighborhoods in question, she finds that


“the neighborhood contexts in which black and white inner-city residents live affect their opportunities to join organizations, interact socially, and participate actively in as well as discuss politics.”45 Interestingly, her study finds that community meeting attendance was actually higher in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty for both Blacks and Whites, which suggests “that residence in concentrated poverty neighborhoods can facilitate social capital and civic engagement by spurring citizens to seek political redress for extant inequalities.”46 So again, structural factors are important but do not always move social capital levels in the expected direction. A social capital model that takes seriously issues of structure and inequality would have to include a variety of contextual issues: racial and economic inequality, poverty rates, homeownership, unemployment, types of employment, level of segregation, and others. It would be especially helpful if such a model could also include some measures of community history, particularly local political organization and/or race relations. While this may seem a tall order, new technologies using geographic mapping programs may make the construction of the “topography” of social capital possible. At the very least, the social capital literature on marginal communities makes it clear that structure matters—collective action does not occur in isolation so we need better ways of measuring that larger social context. The Role of Gatekeepers Chávez and Fraga point out the important role gatekeepers play in determining who has access to the kinds of organizations that build social capital, in both majority and minority communities. Enhancing Putnam’s model, Chávez and Fraga “suggest that the social capital nexus is distinct for communities of color when compared to the general characterization offered by Putnam. When race and ethnicity are taken into account, we argue that the development of social capital requires that the role of gatekeepers be specified” (emphasis in the original).47 They define gatekeepers as: Gatekeepers are comprised of powerholders and their related institutions who largely structure how, for example, frequency of interaction can lead to social trust, how social trust can translate into civic engagement, and especially how civic engagement can translate into social capital.48

In their study of Latino attorneys in the state of Washington, they discover “that the levels of social trust and civic engagement among Latino


attorneys are indeed comparable to those of non-Latino attorneys and even surpass mainstream societal levels.”49 Compared to other Latinos, the authors discover “levels of civic engagement and trust [that] are far above those of Latinos generally.”50 In addition to levels of social capital, Chávez and Fraga also note that “these Latino professionals engage in civic activities both in their ethnic communities and in their broader communities.”51 This is clearly an advantageous situation for building social capital. However, the authors conclude that “(d)espite all of their resources, these professionals are still vulnerable to decisions made by important gatekeepers.”52 Much more work needs to be done that employs the concept of gatekeepers. While the term conjures images of an individual, I would suggest, as Chávez and Fraga do, that it represents a structural factor that promotes activity for some and inhibits activity for others. At what points of access are gatekeepers present? How does race, gender, or class affect when gatekeeping is instituted? What types of social capital implicate the role of gatekeepers? These are all questions that need to be answered and incorporated into our overall understanding of social capital. Conclusion I believe that social capital is a very useful and important concept that can help to deepen our understanding of civic engagement in the United States. However, as it is currently formulated Putnam’s social capital model underemphasizes what the post-World War II generation represents within the context of American history. Since World War II our nation has moved, for the first time in its history, toward a norm of full social, economic, and political inclusion of people of color and women. I argue that this constitutes a significant break in American political culture, one that we as a society have yet to mend. This break is the result of the difficulty for Americans, particularly White Americans, to define their political community without using the trope of race. I contend that race and racial identity(ies) are constitutive of the structure and function of social capital in the United States. This enhancement of the social capital model is important because few social science theories have garnered the attention, in both academic and popular consciousness, as has Robert Putnam’s theory of social capital. Many large foundations have added social capital and civic engagement programs to their funding priorities. Putnam himself has received large grants to continue his social capital work. If Putnam is correct—that we have a crisis of social capital in the United States—then it is crucial that


we accurately identify the causal mechanisms driving that problem. I believe that the current formulation of the problem, with its lack of attention to social relations in general and the central role race plays in the structure and function of social capital, makes it unlikely that scholars will arrive at the appropriate solution. This would constitute a missed opportunity for us all. Notes 1. R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2. R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 3. See the following works: Portes 1998; S. Baron, J. Field, and T. Schuller (eds.), Social Capital: Critical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); S. L. McLean, D. A. Schultz, and M. B. Steger (eds.), Social Capital: Critical Perspectives on Community and “Bowling Alone” (New York: New York University Press, 2002); T. Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); T. Skocpol and M. Fiorina (eds.), Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999). 4. M. Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 103 (199), 281–317. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. M. Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 103 (1997), 281–317. 8. R. D. Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out: the Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 28 (1995), 664–683. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. P. McLain, “Social Capital and Diversity: An Introduction,” Perspectives on Politics, 1 (2003), 101–2. 12. K. E. Portney and J. M. Berry, “Mobilizing Minority Communities: Social Capital and Participation in Urban Neighborhoods,” American Behavioral Scientist, 40 (1997), 632–644. 13. R. Hero, “Social Capital and Racial Inequality in America,” Perspectives on Politics, 1 (2003), 113–22. 14. R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. M. Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 103 (1997), 281–317.


18. R. M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Group Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 19. R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Competing Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 20. G. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 21. See the following works: Knoke, 1990; Marsden, 1987; M. McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and J. M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology, 27 (2001), 415–44. 22. D. Knoke, “Networks of Political Action: Toward Theory Construction,” Social Forces, 68 (1990), 1041–63. 23. P. Marsden, “Core Discussion Networks of Americans,” American Sociological Review, 52 (1987), 122–31. 24. See the following works: L. Bobo, J. R. Kluegel, and R. A. Smith, “LaissezFaire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, S. A. Tuch and J. K. Martin (eds.) (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); D. P Green, D. Z. Strolovitch, and J. S. Wong, “Defended Neighborhoods, Integration, and RaciallyMotivated Crime,” American Journal of Sociology, 104 (1998), 372–403; J. Sidanius, “The Psychology of Group Conflict and the Dynamics of Oppression: A Social Dominance Perspective,” in Explorations in Political Psychology, S. Iyengar and W. G. McGuire (eds.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 25. P. A. Klinkner, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 26. R. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1993). 27. R. M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Group Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 28. A. Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology, 24 (1998), 1–24. 29. M. Olsen, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 30. K. R. Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 31. F. Polletta and J. M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology, 27 (2001), 283–305. 32. L. García Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 33. R. M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Group Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 34. M. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 35. B. G. Link and J. C. Phelan, “Conceptualizing Stigma,” Annual Review of Sociology, 27 (2001), 363–85.


36. See the following works: R. Luhtanen and J. Crocker, “A Collective SelfEsteem Scale: Self-Evaluation of One’s Social Identity,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18 (1992), 302–18; F. Polletta and J. M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology, 27 (2001), 283–305. 37. M. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 38. M. Menchaca, The Mexican Outsiders: A Community History of Marginalization and Discrimination in California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 39. R. Hero, “Social Capital and Racial Inequality in America,” Perspectives on Politics, 1 (2003), 114. 40. Ibid., p. 115. 41. Ibid., p. 120. 42. K. E. Portney and J. M. Berry, “Mobilizing Minority Communities: Social Capital and Participation in Urban Neighborhoods,” American Behavioral Scientist, 40 (1997), 632. 43. Ibid., p. 637. 44. Y. M. Alex-Assensoh, Neighborhood, Family, and Political Behavior in Urban America (Garland Press: New York, 1998), 203. 45. Ibid., 206. 46. Ibid., 215. 47. M. Chávez and L. R. Fraga, “Social Trust, Civic Engagement and Social Mobility,” Paper presented at the annual conference of the Western Political Science Association, Denver, CO (2003), 2. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 3. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Ibid., 3. 52. Ibid. 3.

Chapter 2

Old Whines in New Bottles: Robert Putnam, Richard Florida, and the “Community” Problem in Contemporary America Daniel J. Monti, Jr.

mericans worry about how much “community” they have left, what kinds of community we ought to be making, and where we are most likely to find good examples of community life. These concerns are not new. They were first expressed in a serious way by nineteenth-century European and American writers and reformers who were trying to make sense of all the changes occasioned by wide-scale industrialization and city building. These same questions have received renewed attention in recent years from a variety of left- and right-leaning intellectuals who are convinced that some big changes are taking place in American’s civic habits. Some persons think that American civic life is deteriorating. Robert D. Putnam and Theda Skocpol, to cite two notable examples, think that Americans aren’t joining enough groups, or the right groups, anymore, and we don’t socialize as much as we used to. We may find selfhelp groups to join or do a little more volunteering or send money to organizations whose goals are to influence federal officials. Still, the little pieces of loyalty and money that we pledge do not get as much

A


important civic homework done as older style organizations and homespun grass roots groups did. Our democracy is diminished. Other observers, like Richard Florida and Robert Wuthnow, believe that new kinds of sociability and civic mindedness are replacing more traditional ways that Americans use to get along and work together. People may not be hanging out with each other as much as they used to or they may be joining fewer organizations. On the other hand, that’s only because our modern economy needs more footloose persons and fewer bowling teams, lodges, and local activists constantly on the prowl to find new members and training a small army of citizen soldiers to mind our collective business. Not everyone is so glum about the state of American civic habits. A few social scientists (this author among them) have looked at the same information and come up with a different conclusion. They declare that the changes aren’t as big as people like Putnam and Florida make them out to be, or that Americans seem to be adjusting to them pretty well. In this paper, we are not concerned with whether these researchers are right about where American’s social ties and civic habits are headed. Of greater interest here is the way that Robert Putnam and Richard Florida, two of the more prominent members of civic doomsday and renaissance clubs, package their ideas and numbers. For better or worse, their work has become the touchstone that the rest of us use to convince each other that American civic habits are changing for the worse or for the better. From our standpoint, ideas about the viability and persistence of community life in American society have remained important because we are such a mobile and diverse people. We worry about our communities being filled with so many different kinds of persons, and we work hard (or not) to draw more of them together. Whether you end up taking Putnam’s or Florida’s side in this argument, most informed observers are pessimistic about the prospect of keeping our communities the way they used to be and about passing on our culture to our children. One can tie the work of people like Putnam and Florida to a much longer tradition in which people fret about city life and its deleterious effects on the way we get along and work together. Richard Florida and Melinda Milligan have recently made this connection a bit more explicit by drawing parallels between Florida’s ideas and Putnam’s and tying them to more classic sociological arguments about community life. Here we take this idea one step further (or perhaps backward). We argue that the rhetorical case social scientists make about American’s social ties and civic customs is based on evidence that is not only weak but also manipulated so that it looks a lot stronger than it really is. Our

OLD WHINES IN NEW BOTTLES 23

bottom line is this: the research done by Putnam and Florida is fundamentally overblown and misleading. Those of us who have taken up their challenge to talk about the past and future of community life in America are chewing on ideas that have been around a long time and are based on less than convincing evidence. Richard Florida and the Glories of Gesellschaft Florida’s basic take on the world is that today in the United States we have a “creative economy” built around information, computers, and technological wizardry. This economy thrives on people who are part of a “creative class” composed of highly trained, tolerant, and creative individuals. Professor Florida says that places like Boston or San Francisco have grown fat on the new creative economy and have more of these folks. Places with fewer of them, he asserts, have done much less well in the creative economy derby. And, places that want to be the next Boston or San Francisco would be wise to get more creative, tolerant, and diverse kinds of persons to move in with them. The kinds of “different” people that he has in mind are homosexuals, immigrants, and artistic folks. He measures the openness of a place to creative folks on the basis of how many gays have already settled there (his “gay index”), how many foreigners have been taken in (his “melting pot index”), and how many artsy types are residents (his “bohemian index”). It’s a clever way to set up his argument. In this regard, Richard Florida’s research on the emergence of something he calls the “creative class” is particularly noteworthy. Where he got the information he uses, mostly archival data sources like the census, is fine. On the other hand, by Florida’s own admission, one couldn’t check, for instance, how he’d acquired the number of homosexuals living in the places he studied. He doesn’t show much of the original data that he worked with in order to come up with the way he graded the places he studied. He just converts whatever counts and percentages he has to a simple ranking system and reports those figures. This lets him say that one place had more or less of whatever was being measured, in this case the amount of creative, tolerant, or gay persons. At the same time, it doesn’t tell you by how much. Now there are times when that’s the best you can do, as on surveys when people say they prefer one thing, such as an apple, more or less than some other thing, like a pear. But in this case, Florida presumably had the original counts and percentages upon which the rankings were based and could have provided us with more information. I know that


may sound picky but it really isn’t. If somebody says that one thing is bigger or better than something else, which Florida says a lot, he may be right. But unless you’re able to see how he came to that judgment, and converting hard numbers into softer rankings makes that impossible, you’re essentially flying blind. You have to take the word of the scientist that he knows what he’s talking about and didn’t cook the books, so to speak, just so the picture came out looking like he wanted it to. According to Professor Florida, places that do well in this new-fangled creative economy of ours have a lot more going for them than the nationality, color, or sexual preference of their residents. When lots of bohemians, gays, and immigrants live in your town, he says, you know there’s something fundamentally right with your city’s culture. It shows up in the way you treat people who are different from the ones you know and like best. The presence of many different kinds of persons is an outward sign that the values you hold and the habits you and your neighbors practice welcome diversity. This diversity doesn’t show up just in the people who live there, but in ideas too. That’s how Professor Florida makes the connection between the kinds of persons who live in a place and the creative technology and prosperity they bring to the place by virtue of being so creative. Having different people around, it is argued, breeds a sense of tolerance into people—tolerance not only for those you hug but for innovative thinkers and doers as well. For a community to be successful today, apparently, it has to welcome diversity, be sensitive to people’s differences (in a positive way), and work hard at being flexible and innovative. Sharing, tolerance, and being able to do one’s own thing are in. Exclusivity, stuffiness, and minding your neighbor’s business are out—or so Professor Florida would have us think. Communities that are hot are filled with smart, footloose, edgy innovator types who push the economy and everyone around them into new ways of thinking and acting, kind of like what Richard Florida tries to do. The social ties that successful and creative people like this have are looser. We are not too attached to other people. And it is this airy detachment that lets us be more freethinking in order to help our community do better in the high-tech world that thrives on everything new and different. Again, we know this because Professor Florida has numbers to back up all the stories he likes to tell about creative people, entrepreneurs, and the new economy. In truth, the numbers Florida tosses around to make his stories more believable are not much different from the numbers that most social scientists use. They are counts of persons with particular traits like their color, gender, and income.


There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about Florida’s numbers. The difference comes in the way we package and make sense of them. Florida’s “creative class” doesn’t blossom or become real to us until he connects the dots represented by all the numbers he lays out in his book. If people like Richard Florida only wanted to describe how many individuals of one sort or another lived in a particular place, no one would think a thing of it. But we want to do more than paint a picture of the types of persons who live in a place like Boston. We want to use these counts to tell the story of the lives of the folks being counted. We want to say something important not just about who they are but about the way they live together and what matters to them. That’s a much bigger deal. It’s also a lot harder than you might think to connect the dots between the different types of persons who live someplace so that you can say something that is interesting and defensible about their way of life. The problem is this: Florida hasn’t talked to a cross section of the people that live in all the places he studied, something that no one could do, and he doesn’t have lots of documentary evidence revealing how they talk about themselves. So he’s left to connect the dots himself and to color in all the spaces inside the lines he draws. Florida makes up the story and chooses the crayons that will make it colorful. Robert Putnam and the Decline of Gemeinschaft The same criticism can be leveled at Putnam, whose exhaustive research on Americans’ civic habits has set off a great debate about the future of community life in this country. Everything that Putnam looked at and took as a sign of our civic health—voting, organizational memberships, informal socializing, volunteering, altruism, trust, and reciprocity—tells him that we are worse off today than we were a couple of generations ago. He wants us to look backward to a time when people were closer both in terms of their attachment to each other and to the places where they live and work. Mind you, I didn’t say that some of the evidence Putnam has backs up his story about civic disengagement, or that even most of it does. I said that everything he looks at tells him that we are in big trouble. Professor Putnam apparently has a knack for finding bad news or having it find him. The result in either case is the same. He believes that we are not in good shape and getting worse fast, probably just as much as Richard Florida believes we are getting more creative, tolerant, and productive. At the risk of oversimplifying what is a long and detailed argument, Putnam says that something dramatic and bad happened to America in the late 1960s and early 1970s:


[A] variety of social, economic, and technological changes . . . rendered obsolete a significant stock of America’s social capital. Television, twocareer families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values—these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.1

Putnam also says, however, that we’ve faced this kind of situation before and shouldn’t panic quite yet. The last time our stock of social capital was this low was the turn of the last century, and Putnam says we came out of that trough pretty well. Back then we were at the height of our own industrial revolution. It was the last great technological leap forward before the hi-tech wizardry and information age that fueled Florida’s “creative class” was launched after 1950. Again, back at the top of the twentieth century we were inundated by foreign immigrants on our East Coast from all over Southern and Eastern Europe and on the other side of our country from parts of China and Japan. We also saw an incredible outpouring of art, literature, music, and other forms of mass entertainment that may or may not have included team bowling. These changes may have disrupted our lives and made more of us think that satisfying ourselves was the most important thing we could do. However, Putnam says this also was a time when many of our fellow countrymen made many serious and creative attempts to figure out how to keep us from spinning off into our own private universes. We made new organizations and worked really hard to bring more people into the fold and keep the rest of us already in it from leaving. The organizing and activism came not just in politics but in countless other arenas where human beings figured out that they had an interest in each other’s affairs. In big ways and small ways, Americans exercised the genius for making “associations” that the great French chronicler of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, first described in the 1830s. It was a genuine civic renaissance, and bowling leagues no less than large national organizations were definitely part of that scene. Putnam says that we need to do something like this again, re-start a civic revival. When he first said this in the mid-1990s a lot of persons listened. Almost single-handedly, Professor Putnam rekindled a debate over the size, breadth, and vitality of American civic attentiveness, how wellconnected we are to each other and how much we still trust each other.


We should thank him for that. At the same time, the sheer weight of his argument, with the overwhelming amount of evidence that he amassed to make his point that sociability and civic mindedness in America were sinking fast, made for a powerful indictment of our civic habits and values. I’m not nearly so grateful for that, particularly since I think he was wrong. Comparing the Way that Florida and Putnam Make Their Cases Comparing how Florida and Putnam use the numbers they assembled is instructive. What Florida does in his book is create columns with the names of “regions” that are named after the city at their center. The first column has these regions lined up according to how much technology they have, with the more technologically-rich regions at the top and the poorer regions at the bottom. Then he makes another column of these same places only this time the order they’re in corresponds to, say, how many creative people each one has. Then he compares the two columns. He follows essentially the same procedure for each of the variables he cares about. What he wants to see when he steps back is that all the columns line up in the same way. The places having more technology and more creative, tolerant, and diverse populations he hopes to see at the top of each list, and the places with much less technology or fewer special people he expects to show up at the bottom. It isn’t surprising that Florida finds exactly that when he lined up all the numbers in his tables. Places with more technology had more creative people, more immigrants, bettereducated people, and more homosexuals. Places with less technology had fewer of these same people. The problem is that Florida never tells us everything we need to know about the people that live in the places he studied. There’s simply no way for you to determine why things line up the way he says they do. You never get to see how many tolerant or diverse people live in a given place or what percentage of a particular place’s population is tolerant or diverse. All you get are these rankings or grades that allow him to say that one place is better than another place. You don’t get so much as a glimpse of how many more (or fewer) desirable people each place has. Even the rankings for particular regions seem to change from one table to another without so much as a hint as to why. The problem with his rankings is compounded by the way he interprets them. When he does show you the percentage of creative persons each region has, for instance, there’s not that much difference between


the places he’s comparing. Every region that Florida studied, and there were 268 of them including Boston and San Francisco, has a lot of “creative” people. In fact, the only regions that don’t have at least twenty percent of their people falling into that category are Las Vegas and thirteen other places most of us probably have never been.2 At the other end of the scale are two places, the only two (so far as I’ve been able to tell) that have more than twenty percent of their people who fall within what Professor Florida calls the “Super Creative Core” of the “creative class.” These are Gainesville, Florida and Bryan, Texas. Now, I’ve never been to Lubbock or Laredo, Texas, which are a bit thin in the creative persons department, or Bryan, Texas, either, for that matter, which does very well on that score. I’m sure they’re all nice places and the folks who live there are lovely. But the whole Holy Roman Empire probably didn’t have as many creative people as these places do. By his own accounting scheme, “roughly 30 percent of the entire U.S. workforce” is now part of the “creative class.”3 Unfortunately, places like Lubbock and Laredo are no better than also-rans in America’s creative culture competition. So what are we really talking about here? Well, other than the fact that the nation is lousy with creative people and that there’s not a whole lot of ground separating places with a lot of creative people from those places with fewer of them, probably not much. We have only Professor Florida’s word that these small differences count for a whole lot. The rankings, so far as I can tell, certainly don’t show that regions blessed with the most technology have the most creative people or really score higher in the competition for homosexuals and bohemians, if such things even matter at all. Some places with high rankings in technology have relatively mediocre and even poor rankings in creative, tolerant, or artsy people. While other places that don’t look so hot in terms of being on the technological cutting edge rate pretty high in creativity, tolerance, or diversity. Professor Florida could have settled this matter quite simply had he calculated statistics for all the tables his “research team” produced and reported more than a few in one or two footnotes buried in the back of the book. That would have shown how closely the technology rankings corresponded to the rankings of gays, immigrants, and bohemian types. But he didn’t do that and I don’t think it’s because he’s lazy. I suspect it was because the correlations between creativity, tolerance, or training and technological wizardry were modest at best. In other words, he made a big deal out of some pretty small differences among the places he studied. What we are left with, if we overlook the important tables where he lists the rankings of only the ten highest- and ten lowest-scoring


regions, a pretty slick move, is the sinking feeling that getting a higher or lower ranking probably doesn’t matter a whole lot. It would be nice if we could say that places with more technology have higher percentages of tolerant and artsy people living there. But we can’t say that either, because, as I already noted, Professor Florida doesn’t give us those numbers. Based on what we know from the percentages of persons in his “creative class,” places with more tolerant and diverse folks probably don’t have that many more of them than do places that have a lower ranking on Florida’s report card. It is more likely that every place he studied probably has a good share of bohemian and tolerant types hanging around. All we can say with any confidence is that Boston may be a little or a lot less creative, tolerant, and bohemian than San Francisco, or even Yakima, Washington for all the good that it probably does the people that live there. Whatever is going on in Boston that puts us higher on Florida’s list of good places to live probably doesn’t affect the daily lives of the people who reside there. So, assuming that Florida played around with his numbers, is there anything he says that can be taken seriously? I think there is. Indeed, I believe that what Florida says is not only interesting, in a particular way, but also rather important. However, in spite of the claim, he did not discover something brand new. People have been talking for decades about the rise of a “post-industrial economy” and the professional, technical, and modern service industries that drive it. The same thing goes for all the highly-trained persons that Florida puts in his fictional “creative class.” That class may be bigger today than it used to be, especially if you define and measure it as broadly as he does. But it’s not new; and places like Boston and San Francisco don’t have anything close to a monopoly on creativity, tolerance, and diversity. Florida’s own data make that apparent. Florida’s story has actually been around for over two thousand years. The Greeks own it. They apparently were the first people who worried about what it would take to make their own cities into places where persons from different cultures and walks of life could live, work, and practice the art of politics. They also had the good sense to write it down. So that’s why they always get credit for coming up with these ideas. All that Richard Florida has done, and it’s not a small thing, is to give the Genesis story a couple of nice contemporary twists by bringing gays, new immigrants, and self-revering yuppies into it. The other important thing about his story is that it is one half of the morality tale that people have been telling each other about cities long before they became as creative, tolerant, and diverse as Florida says they are today. The other half, as you may have guessed by now, is a variation


on the story Professor Putnam tells about the decline of civic life in America. Putnam’s story is actually the flip side of Florida’s. It’s all about decay and loss and the rejection of time-honored customs, codes, and beliefs. The story Putnam spins is important because it tells us what we’re supposedly losing when we have too much change way too quickly, changes of the sort that Florida celebrates and contemporary Boston reflects. Putnam isn’t against progress or prosperity. He just believes that in order to be prosperous a community has to keep its civic accounting book every bit as balanced as its business ledger. Putnam’s story is the story of what happens when things get too out of whack and people forget who they are while they rush headlong to become somebody new and better. But that’s not all. Just like Florida’s tale, Putnam’s story is also a fable about the places called cities where all of these changes happen bigger and first. Again, the problem isn’t that stuff changes. It’s that everything changes seemingly at once and in such unfathomable confusion that our brains fry, our spirits wilt, and we retreat to the couch and the illusion of control afforded by the channel changer. Basically, in Putnam’s scheme, cities are places where persons from many different backgrounds and social stations find it difficult to build strong ties and trust each other. The folks who live and work there are less able to draw themselves together in meaningful face-to-face associations. They also lack a common culture that would show them how to make such contacts, even if they thought that it was necessary or a good idea, which they probably no longer believe is the case. In any event, whatever dealings they have with each other would be conducted through much larger and much less intimate organizations—the institutional beasts we call “bureaucracies.” Mind you, these are some of the very features of modern society that Richard Florida claims are the birthright and legacy of his “creative class.” But for Putnam, and many other thinkers and reformers going back many generations, the kind of changes that make us too free and less responsible to each other are a kind of poison that shuts human beings down in bits and pieces. Many of our long-term personal relationships and the local groups we once joined become irrelevant and, from Florida’s point of view, maybe even counterproductive. They get in the way of progress and even more prosperity by turning our creative juices into a late-autumn sap. The problem for folks like Putnam, and the blessing for people like Florida, is that a culture once considered, albeit erroneously, to be an exclusive feature of life in big cities has now spread all over the country. No place is immune. The liberating and the corrosive effects of a modern


and distinctly urban way of life are part of everyone’s life today. That’s why Florida can think it is fine to use the name of a city as a stand-in for a whole metropolitan area or “region.” It’s also the reason why Putnam and most other social commentators speak of a widespread decline in the civic habits of all Americans. They don’t worry very much about how different kinds of Americans practice being sociable or work at making more and better associations to mind their own civic business. As far as Putnam and others of his ilk are concerned, we’re all in the same leaky boat now and sinking fast. The widely-perceived erosion of sociability and civic mindedness in America is only the most recent expression of our fear about the corrupting effects of city life. (The Greeks were worried about that too.) In the past it simply was assumed that people who lived in cities did a poorer job hooking up with each other. We didn’t know if this happened because the people who moved to cities had badness hiding in them or whether there was something about cities that made otherwise good and sane people go bad. The effect in either case was the same. People were not expected to get along as well in cities as they did in other kinds of places. The fact is that most people who live and work in cities enjoy satisfying social lives. They have friends, neighbors, and relatives with whom they keep in touch. They get along well enough to make it through the average day with virtually all of the folks they come into contact with. If they didn’t, we’d have a lot more carnage on the streets and more of us would turn up missing. Sometimes city dwellers do a little better than non-city folk in this regard, and sometimes they do a bit worse. Most of them, however, are anything but anonymous. As many social scientists have shown, people are not cut adrift in a big scary city or unhinged footloose yuppies happy to be left alone. Putnam and Florida both miss this essential point. They both need more people to be lost or at least cut loose, albeit for different reasons, if anybody is going to believe their stories for more than a couple of minutes. So far they’ve both done a lot better than that. And the reason why, I think, is that they have so much evidence that unfailingly points in the direction that each of them wants us to look. The fact that they are looking in completely opposite directions should tell us something about the relation between numbers and storytelling in the social sciences. Not everyone has rushed to Putnam’s defense. Indeed, several social scientists and non-academic commentators were openly skeptical about Putnam’s research findings fairly early on, even as many others countered that the sheer bulk and magnitude of Putnam’s work made these criticisms trivial.


Putnam had already offered the same defense of his work that Florida makes: By virtually every conceivable measure, social capital has eroded steadily and sometimes dramatically over the past two generations. The quantitative evidence is overwhelming, yet most Americans did not need to see charts and graphs to know that something bad has been happening in their communities and in their country. Americans have had a growing sense at some visceral level of disintegrating social bond.4

Putnam believes that his story goes beyond the numbers he painstakingly laid out in the nearly three hundred pages that preceded this comment on his own work. The only thing his number crunching had accomplished, apparently, was to provide scientific support for what most Americans already knew was true. Our stock of social capital was decreasing quickly. Americans didn’t get along or trust each other as much as they once did. Putnam’s critics never said he cooked his numbers so that the results came out the way he wanted. What they did say, however, was that Putnam ignored evidence that contradicted his findings. In effect, our social capital savings account wasn’t nearly as empty as Putnam said it was. By now we should all know that ignoring evidence that might make your findings look less impressive is a no-no in science. Had Putnam thrown his critics a couple of bones and conceded that the picture of sociability and civic mindedness he found wasn’t as grim as the story he wanted to tell, they would have been left snapping at the air. Instead, the nearly perfect layout of an oncoming civic train wreck was simply too much for some in the scientific fraternity to swallow. Some of these critics went so far as to find information about the ways Americans volunteer, donate, and join that Putnam overlooked. His critics discovered another problem once they turned their attention from what Putnam had ignored to what he had done with the information he did show us, which, for the record, was a lot more than Florida ever shared. When they went back to the same big surveys that Putnam used in his book they found that the changes he described, most of which showed people becoming less sociable and civic minded, weren’t as big as he had made them out to be. Americans were doing less engaging and participating, just as Putnam said. But the decreases weren’t as dramatic as he made them sound. There also were instances when at least some people were doing a little more socializing and working together than Putnam had suggested. What it all adds up to is that Putnam made a big deal out of some


pretty modest changes in the way Americans treated each other and joined together as members of different kinds of groups. Just like Florida, the picture he drew with his words was stronger than it should have been. Having said that, lots of people, some of them rather more important than you or me, still liked the way he connected the dots for them. They were drawn to the bright colors Putnam used to fill in all the empty spaces in their heads. Putnam, like Florida, could have avoided making this kind of mistake and mess. All he would have had to do was present statistics that tell us exactly how big and precipitous the changes he described were. But, like Florida, Putnam either chose not to conduct such analyses or, having conducted these kinds of tests, he chose not to talk about them in his book. What we do know is that the story he told was incredibly compelling. It just wasn’t as credible a story as he made it out to be. We know this because we can go back to the numbers he used and see where his train left the track. Why Putnam didn’t do more with his numbers actually matters a lot. That’s the most important lesson to be learned from recreating as many of the graphs and charts that Putnam had in his book from data he has made available on a Web page. Assuming that no big mistakes were made when redoing his tables, what one finds is pretty interesting. For instance, people were entertaining less at home and playing cards less often, spending more time with video games or visiting a casino, and going out to the movies just about as much as they used to. All this Putnam said in his book; and our analysis of his data confirmed what he said. Furthermore, the changes he described were statistically significant. That is to say, they probably weren’t due to chance or some kink in the way people were asked or answered the survey questions. At the same time, the way he portrayed these changes in the book made it look as if they were bigger than they really were. None of the findings was especially strong. The statistic, tau-c, varies between –1.0 and +1.0. For instance, if the answers people gave showed that they spent less time today with friends than they did in the past, then the statistic would have been closer to –1.0, down at the negative end of the scale. If they were doing more of something today, then the statistic would have been closer to +1.0. That is, it would be higher up at the positive end of the scale. The same result pops up when one re-analyzes Putnam’s findings for other variables he examined. Among them were activities that he says Americans do by themselves, like going for a walk, attending an exercise class, and going to a health club. Those all went up too, as did volunteering, another activity Putnam characterized as being more personally


enriching than a benefit to the community. On the other hand, he found that Americans worked on fewer community projects in the 1990s than they had in the mid-1970s. Again, while all these changes were statistically significant, they were still very small.5 It’s not hard to figure out where Putnam was going with all of this. Basically, he wanted to show that Americans were spending more time alone or working on themselves instead of joining other people to do something worthwhile or to enjoy each other’s company. The data he presented certainly allowed him to say that was happening. The only problem was that Putnam made it seem as though many more people were acting this way than was actually the case. That’s why the tau-c statistics all fell below the plus or minus .20 thresholds. The changes were statistically significant but not so large that most of us probably would have had our lives affected dramatically by the changes Putnam described. Putnam’s data indicated that folks who attended more club meetings and church services were more likely to donate blood.6 A real surprise came when one goes back and looks at all the data on church going and blood donating and finds that a rather crucial piece of the puzzle has been left out of the graph presented in Putnam’s book. Men and women who go to church more than twenty-five times a year donate blood more often than a lot of people do. It turns out, however, that persons who never go to church services donate blood almost as often as the better churchgoers do. It’s the folks in the middle, the ones who attend services between one and twenty-four times a year, who are the worst at giving blood. Putnam left the non-churchgoers out of his graph. He kept the mediocre churchgoers and really good churchgoers in the graph. That made it possible for him to argue that church attendance and blood donating were positively associated. People who go to church more often also donate blood more often. Except that’s not how it really works. It’s not at all clear why non-churchgoers would donate blood almost as often as good churchgoing types. It’s also a mystery as to why people who go to church one or two times a month donate blood less often than either the devout or the damned. What we do know is that this rather interesting finding was not reported in the book and that by not reporting it Putnam was able to put another check on his side of the scientific ledger. Of course, the object in putting a scientific puzzle together is to find pieces that fit. The rulebook is very clear, however, about not throwing away pieces that don’t fit, and takes a dim view of cutting bits off so that they will, which is pretty much what Putnam did in this case.


Making Sense of Putnam and Florida’s Disagreement Putnam was right that there has been a real, though not especially big, dropoff in some kinds of socializing and civic participation. He’s also right when he says that it probably would be a good idea if more of us did more together, particularly if what we are doing benefits other persons and not just ourselves. What we are saying is that Putnam, like Florida, was so certain of the validity and power of the story he wanted to tell about American social habits that he didn’t see or didn’t care that the numbers and consequent story don’t add up. What they’re really arguing about is something that Alexis de Tocqueville first brought to our attention in Democracy in America, his landmark study of nineteenth-century American morals and habits. As Henry Steele Commager has observed, Tocqueville made the struggle between liberty and equality the centerpiece of his treatise. Tocqueville asserted, in so many words, that American democracy might well end up chewing off its own leg. He probably thought this for some of the same reasons historian David McCullough tells us that early American prophets like John Adams had argued that competing bases of power and obligation had to be built into our federal government.7 We had to make ways to balance the interests of the few with the needs of the many so that men’s appetites might not too often extend to their neighbors. Precisely how we would end up managing the tension between liberty and equality by balancing our individualism with a healthy dose of working together was anyone’s guess. But that was the key question Americans set themselves up to address in the eighteenth century. Today, right at the top of the twenty-first century, we still find ourselves working the kinks out of our answer. Professors Putnam and Florida probably don’t realize it, but they’re playing with the same ideas and wrestling with the same problem that concerned men like Adams and Tocqueville and, a bit later, Ferdinand Tonnies. That’s why Putnam and Florida can look at the United States today and come up with entirely different pictures about what is right or wrong with the way Americans live together. One declares that we need to take better care of each other, while the other hollers just as loudly that we need to leave each other alone so that each of us can realize the full measure of his talents. Might Putnam privilege equality over liberty? Maybe he wouldn’t use those words, but that’s the idea he’s pushing when he argues that we need to look out for each other more and learn how to work together better. Florida, on the other hand, would push against the walls we put around liberty right up to and probably beyond the point where they groaned


and cracked. He’s for people being allowed to follow their own dreams, believing that in the end we’ll be better off for it. Putnam, of course, wouldn’t be so sure about that last part. Putnam and Florida do have different views about where the best place is to build a better America and American. Putnam likes small ponds, while Florida would prefer that we all swim in much larger bodies of water. Notwithstanding their apparent conflict on this and most other matters, Putnam and Florida really see the world in much the same way. It’s just that one of them likes the direction he sees us moving and the other one doesn’t. Given where he lives and works, it’s hard to imagine that Robert Putnam has a grudge against cities. On the other hand, there’s an awful lot in his book that makes one think he would find smaller places where people know each other better to be more congenial sites for raising families and investing money. Richard Florida, on the other hand, believes that places with lots of different people in them are better. And although Florida’s a big fan of small places that act like big cities, even he would find it hard to argue against the idea that bigger cities are going to have more of the kinds of people he thinks make a place prosperous and show that its people are creative. Therein lies the secret to Putnam and Florida’s stories about what’s happened to American social habits and civic virtues in the years since Adams and Tocqueville. They’re all worried about how we can make more and make nice at the same time. They’re also fiddling with the key to a couple of thousand years’ worth of social commentary and philosophizing about what it takes to make a good community. Basically, on one side of the fence you’ve got a bunch of people who think that small towns and the way of life made there are ideal. On the other side of the fence, there’s a much smaller, but equally committed, collection of persons who think cities offer the best chance for individuals and society as a whole to do better. The problem, of course, is that no matter which of these places you think is better we live in a country that has a lot more people in urban areas than rural ones. No matter how else they might disagree, Professors Putnam and Florida are together when it comes to their view that Americans are working from the same cultural script. So is there anything in that script today about how we’re supposed to juggle liberty and equality? And can it tell us about the way people live in cities? Well yes and quite a bit, actually. Digging deeper into the same large surveys of American attitudes and habits that Putnam and many of our colleagues across the country have been looking at for over a quarter of a century, my collaborators and I have made the following observations: More recent generations of


Americans aren’t much less sociable or civic minded than earlier generations, and whether you live in big cities or smaller towns doesn’t seem to make much difference, either. American social habits may be changing, but they’ve been changing for a while, changing slowly, and changing all over the place. Whatever is happening hasn’t happened so quickly or delivered such a big shock that we can’t handle it. I don’t know what the cultural equivalent of a car’s gearbox would be, but whatever it is we haven’t come close to stripping it. We can all relax. We’re not likely to drive over a cliff any time soon. How we act in our private lives doesn’t necessarily affect the way we act in public. Some people today visit their relatives and neighbors less often than they did in the past but they see friends living outside their immediate neighborhood more often. How regularly we visit other people, however, doesn’t seem to have much bearing on the kinds of groups we join. Some people are good joiners and visitors. Some of us don’t do much of either. But there are a lot of folks who do more visiting than joining, or more joining than visiting. More importantly, the number of persons opting to go one way or the other appears to be increasing. More of us have busy lives today and we can’t be everywhere at once. We’re not being unsociable. We’re just being a bit more selective in how we use the time we have away from work. Not only are more of us opting to be better social butterflies or better groupies but the criteria we use to choose our friends are different from the ones we use to choose the folks we like to work with outside the workplace. It turns out that we have become a bit more discriminating in our private lives even as our public or civic attachments have become a little more open and inclusive. Basically, the folks we like to hang out with are increasingly more like us, while the people we associate with in the groups we join are not. What color we are, the amount of schooling we have had, whether we are a man or a woman, young or old, hold a prestigious job (or not), and have moved up or down in the world still pushes us into certain kinds of relationships and groups. Over the last quarter century, however, these differences have become at least a little more important in our personal lives and a little less important in the way we join many kinds of groups. If there is a thread that runs through these observations, it is this: a great many Americans still have fine relationships with other persons. No small portion of those relationships are probably with persons who come from a different race, the other gender, are older or younger than we are, more or less well educated, and have a job that is better or worse than our own. On the other hand, an equally large number of us still


belong to groups that are pretty strict about whom they let in as members. Compared to even two decades ago, however, it is clear that the people we socialize with informally are likely to have more in common with us than the folks we meet and work with in groups we join. Here we have the making of an explanation for why so many thoughtful persons have been fretting about the state of our civic attachments and worrying about whether we can trust anybody anymore. Americans’ civic lives are changing. The change isn’t hard to describe. Simply put, fewer people like you and me show up in voluntary organizations these days, and more people who aren’t like us seem to be popping up in all kinds of civic places we don’t expect to see them. The way different types of Americans are ending up in the same kinds of organizations at the same time they stick to “their own kind” when it comes to whom they like to hang out with is particularly striking. Men and women, Black people and White people, younger and older folks, more- and less-educated individuals, and persons with better jobs or not such great jobs tend to have different social lives. When it comes to doing the hard work of making associations and putting those groups to work on minding their community’s business, they are taking their cues from the same cultural script. I can’t see how this is anything but a good thing. It’s just another way we’ve figured out how to be different and alike at the same time. If fewer of us are reading that script today or trying out for parts in our great civic epic, as Putnam has shown us, that’s too bad. But it’s not the end of the world either. Clearly, some of us are less involved today than we were even a couple of decades ago. Sometimes we are the kind of persons Americans call “minorities” or we don’t have much formal education or our job isn’t the greatest. Those among us who are not such great joiners and visitors, however, are just as likely to come from the ranks of more privileged or accomplished Americans. This is a problem for persons like Putnam because many of the groups whose decline he chronicles were created back in the good old days and were led by folks we all thought of as “community leaders.” The concern is about what will happen to our communities and way of life if fewer of “us” and more of “them” take on these vital civic posts. As Putnam himself recognizes, however, this is not the first time in our history that well-placed citizens have fretted about the state of our civic lives and the rise of less appealing newcomers to positions of responsibility. Every commentator on American habits since Tocqueville has made a big deal about the associations that Americans make and they were right about making as much noise as they did. All these observers realized that


the groups or voluntary associations we make are a crucial medium for exchanging ideas and learning similar habits. They are the means through which people learn to mind each other’s business and look out for each other. Our ties to each other through these “associations” constitute a peculiar kind of adhesive, one that doesn’t permanently bind people so much as it enables them to stick around, and to, each other in different combinations for various purposes, and for indefinite lengths of time. How we stack and arrange these ties—which persons are allowed to join in and what they bring to the mix—goes some way to defining what a community looks like and how well it works. To the extent that Americans’ civic habits have become more “democratic” of late means that the hard work of building a community in which different people can live, work, and practice the art of politics together goes on. We can’t be sure what good will come of all this work or in what precise direction our society will be nudged as a new generation of civic leaders emerges. What is clear, however, is that our great civic adventure will have some new people helping to plan the itinerary. Quite apart from our private lives, we share similar public sensibilities. Americans have managed the tension between liberty and equality very well, and the way we’ve done it is nothing short of brilliant. Binding our ambitions to something bigger than ourselves, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger told us many decades ago, we discovered how to curb the excesses of liberty and acquisitiveness with healthy doses of working together. If Tocqueville came back for a visit, he would be pleased by our accomplishment. Notes 1. R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 367. 2. R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 335–43. 3. R. Florida, “Cities and the Creative Class,” City & Community, 2 (2003), 8. 4. R. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 287. 5. Ibid., 99, 105, 111, and 128. 6. Ibid., 120–22. 7. D. McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 376–77.


Chapter 3

Social Capital, the Sow’s Ear, and the Closing of the Political Universe Stephen Samuel Smith and Jessica Kulynych

eflecting in 2005 about the scholarly outpouring triggered by his 1995 article “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam said that the intervening decade of research had confirmed many of his initial claims about social capital.1 But, he acknowledged, “[I] now think that my analysis overlooked three important factors: the growth of inequality, the growth of diversity, and the decay of mobilizing organizations.”2 That acknowledgment addresses some of the earliest, strongest, and most frequent criticisms of the work of Putnam and others who tout social capital as a cure for much of what ails the world. According to these criticisms, social capitalists, as Putnam calls himself, downplay crucial issues, such as the growing gap between rich and poor and the political assault on labor, civil rights, and other organizations that represent the exploited and oppressed. The acknowledgment of the importance of these issues follows at least one other major refinement in Putnam’s influential early work on social capital: his subsequent distinction between bonding and bridging social capital.3 With this distinction Putnam sought to address another early, powerful, and strong objection to the putative benign effects of social capital—social capital can sometimes have adverse social consequences, as evidenced by the strong social networks that facilitated Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

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The extent to which these additional variables and conceptual refinements adequately address criticism of the social capital bandwagon rolling merrily through much of the social sciences is very ably discussed elsewhere. Our concern is with a different kind of issue—the problem of using the term social capital to discuss political activity and civic involvement. We do not dispute the importance of studying the empirical phenomena to which the term social capital typically refers; we dispute the use of the term itself. And because the term social capital is the very name of this corpus of scholarship and policy prescription, we view our criticism as pinpointing a sow’s ear that no amount of additional variables or conceptual refinements can turn into a scholarly or policy silk purse. As a result of the historic association of the word capital with economic discourse, the term social capital—when applied to the study of political activity and civic engagement as Putnam has so famously done—blurs key analytic distinctions and has the ideological consequences of euphemizing capitalist social relations as well as making them seem to be a largely inevitable and natural aspect of the human condition. As such, the widespread use of the term contributes to what Marcuse many years ago called the closing of the political universe and the closing of the universe of discourse—the use of language in a way that inhibits thinking that challenges the prevailing social order and its ideological justifications.4 We can anticipate our argument by noting the consequences of this blurring. One consequence involves the analogies with financial capital that are frequently found in the social capital literature. However, to view social capital and financial capital as merely different species of the same genus, capital, is to ignore the extent to which the operation of financial capital constitutes the bowling leagues and neighborhood organizations that exemplify social capital in ways that are deeper and more significant than the ways in which their operation constitutes financial capital. Similarly, actors with access to financial capital, especially large amounts of it, play a role in many aspects of social and political life that is profoundly and qualitatively different from the role allowed by access to social capital, even large amounts of it. A second aspect of this blurring arises from the historic roots of the word capital in economic discourse. As a result of these roots, to characterize civic engagement and the preconditions of democracy as social capital is to foster the view that community involvement and political participation are forms of economic activity, thus blurring important distinctions and undermining the development of all-encompassing, genuine forms of democracy. Similarly, in addition to being rooted in

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economic discourse, the word capital has historically been associated with capitalism, an economic system in which individualism, competition, and the pursuit of wealth play a major role. However, in most political traditions, individualism, competition, and the pursuit of wealth are generally viewed as different from the civic virtues that discussions of social capital frequently seek to promote. Thus, to call upon all citizens to become social capitalists, as Robert Putnam does,5 is to use the word in a manner that obscures many of capital’s longstanding and historic meanings. Moreover, as suggested by Putnam’s use of the term social capitalist, as well as by his claim that working-class solidarity is a form of social capital,6 the term social capital imposes a universalizing logic on political activity that minimizes the historical context that gives meaning to much of this activity. Employing a term that blurs these many distinctions adversely affects scholarly inquiry, whatever its implicit or explicit normative concerns. That adverse effect is sufficient to justify the use of a term other than social capital. Adding to the case for an alternative are the ideological consequences of the term social capital. By giving the word capital so broad, pervasive, and honorific a meaning, the term social capital, and derivatives such as social capitalist, serve to naturalize and legitimate the social, economic, and political relations that characterize capitalism. As a result, the term social capital has important ideological consequences that, whatever one’s normative position on the merits of capitalism, require acknowledgment. But such acknowledgment is largely absent from the literature on social capital. That absence only serves to amplify the term’s ideological consequences. Underlying our discussion of the analytical and ideological consequences of the term social capital is a view that sees the language and categories of political and social inquiry as having wide-ranging consequences of the kind nicely summarized by David McNally: Language is thus social and historical. Meanings exist for me only in my relations with others . . . and these social relations themselves are dynamic; they involve struggles over domination and resistance, shifting balances of force and power . . . Language does not present me with a single structure of grammatical relations and meanings. On the contrary, my involvement in language entails my immersion in a social and historical field of themes, accents and meanings, which are always contested and never closed. The word I choose, the utterances I convey, involve a positioning within that field. There are always alternative ways of expressing and articulating my experiences, my positions, my aspirations.7


In addition to agreeing with McNally that meanings are the result of struggles and are always open to change and contestation, we would emphasize that these struggles reflect and constitute power relations in society. They are struggles, as Nancy Fraser explains, to “define social reality” and thus to “enshrine certain interpretations of social life as authoritative and to delegitimate or obscure others.” Within this struggle: Particular words and expressions often become focal . . . functioning as keywords, sites at which the meaning of social experience is negotiated and contested. Keywords typically carry unspoken assumptions and connotations that can powerfully influence the discourses they permeate—in part by constituting a body of doxa, or taken for granted commonsense belief that escapes critical scrutiny.8

Our inquiry is concerned with the way social capital functions as a keyword in recent politics and scholarship. We explore the context in which social capital has become such a keyword, as well as the taken-forgranted beliefs that underlie the term. Our concern is with what the term means. Ultimately, our analytical and ideological critiques come together in this “politics of language.” To the extent that the terminology of social capital brings together contradictory ideas, ignores the history and context of those ideas, and makes evaluative or normative theorizing difficult, it also enshrines a certain definition of social reality. Our argument develops in three stages. The first provides an account of the recent history of the term social capital to show how its current usage constitutes a one-sided version of a contested lineage. The second stage discusses reasons for the popularity of the term, which cannot be understood, we argue, absent the term’s consonance with a wide range of recent intellectual, political, and social developments. Among these developments are the economic atmosphere in the U.S., the seeming triumph of capitalism over alternative ways of organizing economic activity, the bureaucratization of the policy-making process, and what has been called—both boastfully and scornfully—economic imperialism: the use of methods and concepts rooted in neo-classical economics to understand a wide range of political and social relations. The second section also develops our arguments about the analytic and ideological consequences of the term social capital. Finally, the third section sums up our argument and suggests that the term social capacity has as much heuristic value as the term social capital without having unfortunate ideological implications and obscuring key analytic distinctions.

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The Meanings of Social Capital One consequence of the contemporary interest in social capital has been that considerable research has been done on the history of the term, which appears, albeit with various meanings, in the works of intellectual titans such as John Dewey, Alfred Marshall, and Karl Marx. Lesserknown writers used the term as well. Among them was Lyda J. Hanifan, an early twentieth-century educator and reformer, whom Putnam credits with developing an “account of social capital [that] anticipated virtually all the crucial elements in later interpretations but his conceptual invention apparently attracted no notice . . . and disappeared without a trace.”9 While the term also appears, again with widely varying meanings, in the work of other writers, it did not figure prominently or systematically in postwar social theory until Pierre Bourdieu used it to name one of his pivotal theoretical constructs. Bourdieu conceptualizes social capital in terms of networks that are intimately related to the theoretical concerns around which much of his work pivots: the structures and processes that facilitate the reproduction of power and privilege. The term social capital appears in Bourdieu’s work at least as early as the 1970 publication of La Reproduction, the English translation of which was published in 1977 as Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture.10 However, his most systematic and accessible discussion of the concept can be found in the 1983 “Ökonomishes Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital” which appeared in English in 1985 under the title “The Forms of Capital.”11 In this piece Bourdieu argues that one cannot understand the social world without considering capital, but it is “capital in all its forms and not solely in the form recognized by economic theory.”12 The “three fundamental guises” in which capital can present itself are: economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (“connections”), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title or nobility.13

Social capital he further explains: is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships


of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, to membership in a group.14

As indicated by the definitions of the three guises of capital, cultural and social capital are convertible to economic capital, but the latter, he makes clear, is primary.15 After Bourdieu, the next major theorist to discuss social capital in a comprehensive manner was James S. Coleman who views social capital as a corrective to “the broadly perpetrated fiction in modern society” associated with the political philosophy of natural rights and classical and neoclassical economic theory that society “consists of a set of independent individuals . . . and that the functioning of the social system consists of the combination of these actions of independent individuals.”16 The concept of social capital corrects this fiction by calling attention to certain aspects of social structure. The concept’s value “lies primarily in the fact that it identifies certain aspects of social structure by their function . . . The function identified by the concept ‘social capital’ is the value of those aspects of social structure to actors, as resources that can be used by the actors to realize their interests.”17 Calling attention to the way economists have used the concept of human capital in the past thirty years, Coleman extends the analogy to include social capital: Just as physical capital is created by making changes in materials so as to form tools that facilitate production, human capital is created by changing persons so as to give them skills and capabilities that make them able to act in new ways. Social capital, in turn, is created when the relations among persons change in ways that facilitate action. Physical capital is wholly tangible . . . human capital is less tangible, being embodied in the skills and knowledge acquired by an individual; social capital is even less tangible, for it is embodied in the relations among persons.18

Insofar as Coleman sees social capital as embodied in relations among individuals, there is an overlap between his perspective and Bourdieu’s. Moreover, there are certain obvious parallels between the two scholars’ trinities—Coleman’s physical/human/social capital and Bourdieu’s economic/cultural/social capital—but the differences, only slightly less obvious, are at least as striking. For Bourdieu social capital is crucial to the reproduction of prevailing class, power, and status relationships. Coleman, on the other hand, presents social capital as fulfilling functions that are much more benign. This presentation is exemplified by all of the examples he uses to introduce his theoretical discussion. The first

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example involves radical student activists in South Korea whose similar geographic origins are a source of social capital. In addition, their “study circles themselves constitute a form of social capital—a cellular form of organization” that facilitates opposition to a repressive regime.19 The second example concerns the sources of trust between doctor and patient; a third concerns the differences between Jerusalem and Detroit that allow a mother to let her children travel and play unattended in the Middle East but not the Motor City; and the fourth concerns the way that merchants in Cairo’s central market cooperate to satisfy both their own and their customers’ needs and preferences.20 Who but the likes of a member of the secret police, child molester, ambulance-chasing attorney, or usurer could take exception to these goals? Although Bourdieu’s use of social capital antedates Coleman’s by many years, in the social capital corpus Bourdieu has largely gone, as Ben Fine puts it, “from distinction to extinction”21 because it is Coleman’s conception of social capital that has been adopted by scholars, journalists, and policymakers. The most important example of the prominence of Coleman’s understanding, and neglect of Bourdieu’s, is the work of Robert Putnam whose celebrated attempts to understand democracy and civic life go a long way toward explaining social capital’s popularity in scholarly and lay discourse.22 Bourdieu’s name does not appear in the index of Putnam’s seminal book dealing with democracy in Italy nor is he mentioned in the key footnote dealing with social capital where Putnam cites Coleman and several other authors.23 Moreover, Bourdieu’s name is absent from Putnam’s early work on civic engagement in the United States and when it does subsequently appear, Putnam elides the crucial differences between Bourdieu’s and Coleman’s usages.24 Like Coleman, Putnam sees an increase of social capital as the solution to a wide range of problems. Perhaps his most sweeping claim is contained in the final sentence of Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, “Building social capital will not be easy, but it is the key to making democracy work.”25 That claim was slightly modified in Putnam’s subsequent Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, “The performance of our democratic institutions depends in measurable ways upon social capital.”26 However, this book, too, contains an expansive view of social capital. Commenting upon the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Putnam claims that “Fraternity, as the French democrats intended it, was another name for what I term ‘social capital.’”27 Commenting on other positive consequences of social capital, he says:


Historically, social capital has been the main weapon of the have-nots, who lacked other forms of capital. “Solidarity forever” is a proud, strategically sensible rallying cry for those such as ethnic minorities or the working class, who lack access to conventional political clout.28

As noted at the chapter’s outset, Putnam’s work has given rise to widespread research and debate. In addition to the contested issues noted earlier, two are especially relevant here. The first involves the relationship between the social capital corpus and the growing influence of economic models in the social sciences. For example, after noting this influence, Foley and Edwards say that social capital “is the most recent in a string of efforts—including human capital and cultural capital—to amend or overcome the failure of the predominant economic model to incorporate nonmarket factors.”29 In this respect, they see social capital as an extremely useful heuristic “for drawing attention to neglected nonmarket aspects of social reality.”30 The second issue involves the claim that the term social capital merely puts old conceptual and theoretical wine in a new terminological bottle. As past president of the American Sociological Association Alejandro Portes points out, the “term does not embody any idea really new to sociologists,” but “simply recaptures an insight present since the very beginnings of the discipline.”31 Given that this insight has been around for so long a time, Portes attributes “the novelty and heuristic power of social capital” to two sources. First, it emphasizes “the positive consequences of sociability while putting aside its less attractive features.” Second, it allows these positive consequences to be viewed as: sources of power and influence, like the size of one’s stock holdings or bank account. The potential fungibility of diverse sources of capital reduces the distance between the sociological and economic perspectives and simultaneously engages the attention of policymakers seeking less costly, non-economic solutions to social problems.32

Like Portes, we believe that part of the appeal of the term social capital is that it deflects attention away from other issues. However, we propose to take this point further by discussing how the mutually reinforcing relationship between the term social capital and the intellectual, political, and economic milieu of the past two decades, especially in the United States, have also contributed to the widespread use of the term social capital. We applaud, as do Foley and Edwards, efforts “to amend or overcome the failure of the predominant economic model to incorporate nonmarket factors.” However, in our view, there are many problems

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with using a vocabulary—especially the term social capital—drawn from the predominant economic model to overcome the deficits of this model because, rather than reducing the distance between the economic and other perspectives, the term social capital dissolves the latter into the former, thus distracting attention away from key political issues. Social Capital, Language, and the World Before discussing how the term social capital as developed by Coleman and applied by Putnam impedes rather than advances understanding, it will be useful to emphasize how the term invokes ideas, values, and sentiments that are intimately linked to the political, intellectual, and economic climate of the past two decades. Indeed, it would be surprising if such linkages did not exist because the many differing, vague, and contradictory uses of the term, combined with the fact that, as Portes says, “[it] does not embody any idea really new to sociologists,” make it hard to believe that the term’s popularity can be solely attributed to whatever heuristic value it may possess. Our discussion will thus highlight the complex interplay between language and the world—demonstrating how our language is in part shaped by our world, and how our world is in part shaped by our language. We can begin to understand these issues by looking at the social sciences themselves. A key aspect of developments in these disciplines during the past half century is exemplified by the title of an edited volume that included one of Coleman’s early discussions of social capital: Economic Imperialism: The Economic Method Applied Outside the Field of Economics.33 Whether this imperialism is celebrated, as it was in this book, or criticized, as in others, it is clear that the past fifty years have witnessed the increasing application of concepts and methods traditionally associated with economics to a wide range of issues traditionally the responsibility of political scientists and sociologists. Given such economic imperialism, Putnam’s claims about the importance to democracy of social capital—a concept ultimately rooted in economic analysis—is perhaps not all that remarkable. After all, one of the most influential books written in the past fifty years dealing with democracy was titled An Economic Theory of Democracy; and while social capital played no role in Downs’s 1957 classic, the book was a seminal attempt to apply economic analyses to the study of democracy.34 While the spread of economic analysis is indisputable, the jury is still out on its causes and effects. Undoubtedly, there are intellectual benefits endogenous to political inquiry that account in part for the popularity


of economic analysis in such inquiry. In addition, certain applications of economic analysis have been fruitful for the understanding of social and political phenomena. However, the intellectual consistency, stability, and predictability provided by this form of analysis cannot entirely explain its rapid rise to canonical levels. Rather, the popularity in political inquiry of economic analysis, in general, and social capital, in particular, cannot be understood absent discussion of broader political and intellectual developments. Theodore Lowi called attention to some of these developments in his 1991 presidential address to the American Political Science Association in which he argued that the increasing use of economic analysis by policymakers is paralleled by a “depoliticization” of politics.35 Much of Lowi’s argument rests on the claim that the influence of economics in political analysis is linked to the growing bureaucratization of the policymaking process, a development that has been discussed at length by many other commentators, including the early Frankfort theorists, Habermas, Cohen and Rogers, and Young.36 These commentators note that as the state becomes increasingly bureaucratized, efficiency becomes the primary political value, replacing discussions of justice and interest with discussions of what is possible and practical—with means rather than ends and with method rather than truth. Divorced from substantive debate over the ends of politics, public decision-making becomes primarily a technical problem. Traditional political issues are redefined as technical issues to be solved by experts. Valorization of Capitalism To these long-range trends contributing to economic imperialism in general can be added important recent historical events that further explain the popularity of the term social capital. To begin with, the prospects for states and movements rooted in the Marxist tradition have diminished significantly. The Soviet Union has collapsed. China is increasingly characterized by capitalist relations of production and growing economic inequality. And, while insurgent movements calling themselves Marxist can be found in many parts of the world, their ability, either singly or in toto, to make any significant changes in global economic or political relationships seems weaker than at any time during the past hundred years. Insofar as the Marxist tradition has been seen, both by itself and its antagonists, as the major challenge to capitalism, the demise and decline of movements in that tradition make capitalism’s

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sway and influence seem stronger than at any time since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. The same years that have seen the decline, demise, and discrediting of movements and states claiming inspiration from Marx have generally been years of growth, at least according to conventional indicators, for the world’s single most important capitalist economy, the United States. Moreover, whatever devastation has been caused on a world scale by the economic restructuring and increased globalization of the late twentieth century, the institutions and individuals who own, control, and/or have access to capital have done quite well during this period, despite the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the subsequent two-year downturn of the stock market. While these profits have especially gone to owners and managers of large amounts of capital, they have also benefited individuals with access to small amounts, such as those typically possessed by people who think, write, and read about democracy, trust, civic engagement, and similar issues. In the halls of academia it has been difficult during most of the past twenty years to read a quarterly statement from TIAA-CREF without feeling the warm glow that accompanies citizenship in the shareholder nation that the United States is touted to be by the business pages in the daily paper. Capitalism’s current widespread prestige contrasts sharply with the situation in 1916, the year in which Hanifan first used the term social capital, and when this conceptual innovation, as Putnam points out, attracted no notice. There are undoubtedly many reasons why Hanifan’s terminology failed to catch fire, but some of them almost certainly reflected the fact that during the decade in which he was writing, capitalism and capital lacked the widespread cachet they would enjoy eighty years later. Among that decade’s characteristics depriving capitalism and capital of such widespread cachet were: an influential Progressive movement, a vigorous socialist party, the strike wave of 1919, and a Bolshevik Revolution that to millions around the world portended, initially at least, an era in which life would not be so pervasively shaped by the differential ownership and control of capital, as the term was then widely understood to mean. In such a milieu, it is difficult to believe that, even if some other writers did pick up Hanifan’s usage of social capital, the term would have been as widely embraced in the 1910s as it has been in the past twenty years with so little commentary about the ideological and political consequences of using the term to characterize an extremely broad range of social relations, including working class solidarity and the political resources of the poor.


Social Capital in the Contemporary Political Milieu When we examine the language of social capital against this background of general depoliticization and specific valorization of capitalism, it is apparent that our language is a reflection of the world around us. The concept of social capital reflects both the long-term tendencies toward the bureaucratization of policymaking and political processes described by Lowi, Habermas, and other theorists as well as specific historical events of the late twentieth century. Talking about political life as if the accumulation of capital determines our performance in the public marketplace is understandable if we really have become consumer-citizens. The reification of method implied by social capital’s economistic interpretation of human behavior reflects the bureaucratization of public life and the consequent rise of technical expertise and strategic calculation in political decisionmaking. Accumulating social capital becomes more important than the ends to which that capital is to be put. Lowi’s description of economistic political science as “dismal” and lacking passion is hardly surprising in a world where public decision-making is largely devoid of normative content.37 Social capital, we should add, is just one of many examples of how the vocabulary of the stock market has permeated social and political discourse in the late twentieth century. Consider, for example, Putnam’s description of his methodology in Making Democracy Work. Discussing the importance of using several different methodologies for gathering data, Putnam states, “The prudent social scientist, like the wise investor, must rely on diversification to magnify the strengths, and to offset the weaknesses, of any single instrument.”38 Like the wise investor? Why not the cook who combines just the right amount of several different spices to get the desired taste? Why not the dietician who chooses foods from several different groups to assure good health? Why not the savvy coach who knows the dangers of relying on one player to score all the points? Why not the farmer who knows the folly of putting all the eggs in a single basket? Surely, cooking, eating, participation in sports, and transporting fragile objects are more basic aspects of human experience than investing. But in the heady economic atmosphere of the late twentieth century United States, Putnam could be confident that those who read about social capital would be as familiar with prudent investment strategies as those who write about it. Consider also the opening paragraph of the announcement of the April 1999 annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association (UAA), the

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theme of which was “The Social Reconstruction of the City: Social Capital and Community Building.” As cities have responded to new economic, political, and policy contexts, they have begun to develop a portfolio of strategies for institution building and community revitalization. These efforts have developed what can be seen as social capital, a partner to financial capital. Central to this portfolio is the education system . . . Intellectual skills have become as central to the future of urban areas as manual labor was to the past; efforts to improve, develop, and extend these skills are now entering the portfolio of development strategies.39

Portfolio? Would not repertory or group have served equally well? As the economistic implications of the language of capital reflect the apolitical character of public life, so too does the language of the stock market used to discuss research strategies and the amelioration of social problems reflect the contemporary hegemony of capitalism. How Language Shapes the World: Thinking About Social Problems Were it true that the term social capital merely reflects the socio-political context of the late twentieth century, we might find its use disheartening, but not necessarily worthy of sustained critique. But we believe that the use of the language of social capital is more than a reflection of an already existing world. The term social capital also helps to create and sustain that world and the language itself has pernicious consequences. One of the reasons these consequences are pernicious is that the term social capital involves claims about social reality that are even stronger than those underlying generic economic imperialism. Generic economic imperialism generally involves the use of models in which self-interest is the key, if not the only, motivation underlying human behavior. In responding to criticism that such an approach reduces the richness of human motivation to the mere pursuit of self-interest, proponents of such models frequently respond that they do not deny the existence of benevolence, altruism, anger, and so forth. Rather, they claim that human behavior can be understood as if it were chiefly, or even solely, motivated by self-interest. But social capital is not an as-if concept. While social capital may not be palpable, for Coleman and Putnam it is every bit as real as any other non-physical aspect of social reality. Lest there be any doubt that social capital is not an as-if concept, consider the numerous discussions of ways to increase the stock of social


capital as in the concluding chapter of Bowling Alone titled “Toward an Agenda for Social Capitalists.”40 Such discussions call attention to another difference between social capital and self-interest. Eighteenthcentury theorists may have encouraged the pursuit of self-interest because, as Hirschman has pointed out, they viewed it as more benign than the pursuit of glory, which, in their view, had ravaged European civilization.41 But two hundred years after Adam Smith, very little of the literature rooted in neo-classical economics encourages the pursuit of self-interest in the way that the literature on social capital frequently prescribes an increase in its stock as a way to improve democracy, childrearing, education, and to deal with a broad range of social problems. Consider again the announcement of the 1999 annual meeting of the UAA quoted earlier. Perhaps, as the announcement says, there is a great need for partnerships between social and financial capital in the reconstruction of the city. But surely any discussion of such partnerships must be framed by the recognition that the need for the social reconstruction of the city stems in no small measure from the way in which financial capital—through real estate speculation, development, deindustrialization, and so forth—has devastated many cities and eroded what is usually termed their social capital. Yet the linkage between the operation of financial capital and the erosion of urban social capital typically receives very little attention in discussions of the social reconstruction of the city. For example, no mention of this linkage appears in the announcement of the UAA’s annual meeting cited above. It is surely one of the great ironies of contemporary social thought that at the very time when the inequities of income and wealth of existing global capitalism are skyrocketing, there has been an explosion of both professional and lay literature that views a broad spectrum of social problems in terms of social capital. Such a view suggests that all parties can gain access to capital, just different forms, and that appropriate “investments” in social capital will compensate for gross inequities in financial capital. But whatever social capital might be embodied in a plethora of bowling leagues, PTAs, church groups, and other neighborhood organizations is rarely sufficient to oppose successfully the sway of financial capital or even approximate the social capital (e.g., institutional affiliations and networks of powerful people) enjoyed by those with access to the most financial capital. Moreover, as indicated by how the loss of jobs has eroded the ghetto neighborhood organizations and networks that exemplify social capital, the operation of financial capital constitutes these organizations and networks much more than they constitute financial capital.

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Thinking About Democracy In addition to distorting understanding of social problems, the term social capital undermines the development of an all encompassing, genuine form of democracy. Not content with protective and elitist versions of democracy, participatory and deliberative theorists have put forth rich and compelling alternatives that strive to engender genuine participation and to guarantee equal voice in public life. In these thick versions of democracy, genuine participation is qualitatively different from a market transaction, and public deliberation and reasoning are distinct from other types of social and strategic communication. Deliberative and participatory versions of democracy require an atmosphere and attitude where people see their political interactions as motivated by the search for the best and most just solutions to public problems. Thus, as Young points out, people must see themselves and their interests as capable of being transformed by the political process, and they must constantly strive to have their deliberations informed by as many social perspectives as possible.42 As Rousseau first suggested, all must care about having everyone’s voice heard. Economic transactions, on the other hand, assume and require no such attitude of magnanimity and familiarity. Economic transactions generally begin with a fixed interest and work to achieve that interest. Such transactions make little “economic” sense if one’s interests are fundamentally transformed in the process because economic transactions are instrumental not transformative ones. The term social capital ignores the emotionally rich world of meaning that has surrounded the idea of democracy and reduces that world of meaning to the very different language of economics. In employing the language of economics, the term social capital privatizes public communication. Thinking about political participation in the language of the market encourages us to see political participation in a limited, instrumental way. The terminology of social capital allows the language of economic transaction to describe public interactions, thereby integrating two distinct and opposing worlds of meaning. This terminology also equalizes these opposing worlds of meaning. If we think of political activity as just another type of economic transaction, as rooted in just another type of capital, then we can easily attribute equal worth to these activities, putting economic activity on par with political activity. This normative sleight of hand eviscerates democracy—setting up two normatively different activities as equal and alike, and thereby elevating the value of one and diminishing the value of the other.


Thinking About Labor and Poor People’s Organizations In addition to undermining the development of thick versions of democracy, the term social capital calls to mind Marcuse’s discussion in One Dimensional Man of how certain types of language integrate their conceptual opposites, thus smoothing over the tension between contradictory concepts.43 This problem is evident when the term social capital is used to describe labor and poor people’s organizations. Consider for example, Putnam’s view, noted above, that working-class solidarity is a form of social capital. Both the nature and magnitude of the problem can best be appreciated by recalling the song whose title gave rise to the slogan “solidarity forever,” a rallying cry that Putnam views as a proud and strategically sensible one. Trust may be an essential component of solidarity but the solidarity celebrated in this song has aspects to which the term social capital cannot even begin to do justice. This is so for three reasons. First, the solidarity invoked by the song involves sentiments of all-for-one and one-for-all that are diametrically opposed to the competitive, individualist ones evoked by the terms capital and capitalism. Second, the solidarity called for by the song involves a very sharp distinction between the “greedy parasite” with “untold millions that they never toiled to earn” and working people, standing “outcast and starving ’mid the wonders we have made.”44 Accompanying that sharp distinction are anger, resentment, and fury that cannot be comprehended by even the most updated language of social capital. This is because, while those sentiments evoke what Putnam calls bonding social capital, the social context giving rise to this bonding is profoundly different from that which characterized the bonding social capital in, for example, the networks with which Timothy McVeigh was affiliated, however much they too were characterized by anger, resentment, and fury. Nor can the sentiment of solidarity evoked by those verses be reduced to the quotidian trust and norms of reciprocity embodied in organizations more laudable than McVeigh’s— e.g., bowling leagues and PTAs—because the contexts giving rise to the norms of reciprocity of these various organizations are profoundly different. To say that, as Putnam does, “social capital has been the main weapon of the have-nots” is to emphasize form at the expense of content and to ignore the consciousness—whether trade-unionist, revolutionary, or whatever—that gives working-class solidarity its political meaning. Finally, the song involves a revolutionary vision of “bringing to birth a new world from the ashes of the old” and this new world’s being the working class’s “not to slave in, but to master and to own.”45 This

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revolutionary vision reflects the affiliation of Ralph Chaplin, the lyricist, who was the editor of Solidarity, the newspaper of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).46 The IWW, it should be remembered, called for the overthrow of capitalism and began its constitution by claiming that “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”47 To be sure, most of the song is typically skipped in contemporary union halls, few contemporary union members know the song’s origins or anything about the IWW, and Putnam has no obligation to help today’s labor movement better understand its history. However, he has a scholarly obligation to not obfuscate that history, especially because he fully understands, as noted in Making Democracy Work, that “history matters.”48 Indeed much of the power of the empirical analyses in that book, and in Bowling Alone, stems from the sensitivity to history and to how the past, and peoples’ understanding of it, shapes the present. But to apply the language of social capital to working class solidarity—especially the slogan Solidarity Forever—is to display extraordinary insensitivity to history. To say, as Putnam does, that “social capital has been the main weapon of the have-nots who lack other forms of capital” is to render, in effect, the opening statement of the IWW constitution as, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common—except different forms of capital.” Moreover, for Putnam to conceptualize the solidarity in “Solidarity Forever” as a form of social capital makes a mockery of the song’s aspiration that working-class solidarity can help birth a new world that is not plagued by capitalist economic, political, and social relations. Academics are not the only ones whose understanding of the political organization of the disadvantaged is distorted by the term social capital. The remarks of community organizers face similar difficulties, as evidenced by the comments of Ernesto Cortes, one of the leaders of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Arguably, the IAF has more, and more successful, community organizing experience under its belt than any other organization in the country. Because of the IAF’s importance and because we are sympathetic to its efforts, we discuss in depth how the language of social capital undermines the organization’s goals. The IAF grew out of the work of Saul Alinsky who, in his famous Reveille for Radicals, explains the conflictive action necessary to fight oppression. What he called a People’s Organization is not “a social service’s ameliorative gesture, but a hard-driving force, striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which beset the people.” Such an organization, he continues, “thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups” and is dedicated to “an eternal war” against poverty, misery, injustice, and despair.49


Yet, in the 1990s, fifty years later, Ernesto Cortes, a regional director of the IAF and one of its main theorists, uses a very different language to describe its activities. He describes community organizing as “reweaving the social fabric,” saying that social capital is “crucial to the resolution of crises and the alleviation of poverty.”50 Part of the problem with Cortes’s use of the term social capital is indicated by our earlier discussion of how the operation of financial capital has eroded urban social capital. To rephrase that earlier discussion in terms of Cortes’s social fabric metaphor: there is no way that by itself social can mend what financial capital has torn, or that by itself social capital can prevent additional tears. Another part of the problem with Cortes’s use of the term social capital is indicated in the previous section about democracy. With its emphasis on how political activity can transform the thinking of poor people, the IAF’s concern with participatory democracy, like all thick versions of democracy, is undermined by the language of social capital. But Cortes’s use of the term social capital involves even broader conflicts with the IAF’s goal of empowering poor people. Achieving that empowerment depends on recognizing that, according to Cortes, “without strong countervailing institutions, the imperialism of the market will dominate and penetrate all relationships, in both public and private spheres.”51 However, while Cortes seeks to build institutions capable of countering the imperialism of the market, his use of the term social capital contributes at a linguistic level to that imperialism. It does so because the unspoken assumptions and connotations of the word capital work against Cortes’s vision of the collective empowerment of poor people. We can see how the term social capital works against collective empowerment by noting that Cortes sees community organizations as helping to create: an organized constituency with the power and imagination to initiate and support policies for change. If we are to create such a constituency and restore health and integrity to our political process, mitigating the distorting role and influence of organized concentrations of wealth, then we must be vigilant in the development of real democratic institutions.52

Those are laudable goals but the language of social capital undermines them because the language of the market, of capital and capitalism, and of investment and profit, is associated with a world where individuals compete to get ahead, where life is a race to the top, and where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. These are concepts that invoke

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cultural images of competition, self-reliance, and independence, revered traits in U.S. culture. As such, they reinforce a rugged individualist ideology with regard to success, citizenship, and progress. This discursive cultural context inevitably shapes the way we think about people. When we use terminology so rich in cultural meaning we cannot avoid bringing these often pre-reflective meanings into our understanding. In many of the situations in which social capital terminology is used, the assumptions and connotations that accompany the term capital infect and distort our understanding. By arguing that the disadvantaged need social capital, Cortes inadvertently argues that the disadvantaged need to be more competitive, self-reliant, and independent. Here, the discourse of social capital suggests that the powerlessness of the disadvantaged is a result of not enough capital—i.e., not enough independence and self-reliance. Indeed, Cortes’s own language invokes the cultural image of independence and self-reliance: To think of our relationships as “capital” suggests a different way of thinking about other people. To create capital we must invest labor and energy, and effort in the here and now to create something for later use. We must expend energy now in creating a tool, or learning a skill, or saving money, or building a relationship in order to put it to use in the future. Investment requires the ability and discipline to defer gratification, to invest energy not only in the needs or pleasures of the present, but also in the potential demands of the future.53

This is self-defeating and contradictory language. Certainly Cortes is not buying into the stereotype that poor people are lazy, undisciplined, and unable to defer gratification. Indeed this cultural stereotype is largely the result of a language of welfare that categorizes many poor people as passive clients of the state. By invoking the self-reliant imagery of capital, Cortes reinforces a negative image that portrays poor people as in need of discipline, hard work, and self-control. For people who already experience their lives as filled with unremunerated work and a lack of power, a vocabulary that reinforces those sentiments works against the IAF’s stated goal of collective empowerment. Cortes is actually arguing for the “social” part of social capital: community, interdependence, and collaboration, not individual self-reliance. Unfortunately, the contradictory juxtaposition of social (collaboration and interdependence) with capital (independence and self-reliance) allows us to continue to view the poor as not only in need of traditional individualist values, but also as largely to blame for their lack of a


“stock” of social power. Thus, this language smoothes over contradictions in just the way Marcuse warned. Thinking About Political Activity Our comments about how the term social capital weakens discussions of labor and poor people’s organizations can be expanded to a discussion of political activity in general. Although there is ongoing debate about the generic merits of transcontextual theoretical language, there is no need to take a position in this debate to recognize that the term social capital imposes a universalizing logic on political activity that impedes understanding. Our earlier discussion of working-class solidarity illustrates this point. Given the way that Putnam and Coleman define the term social capital, working-class solidarity is perforce an example of it and must be included along with the relations that characterize bowling leagues, PTAs, and right-wing militias in the category social capital. But to view working-class solidarity as an example of social capital raises all the weighty problems noted earlier. Perhaps we might try to address these difficulties by developing additional categories of social capital just as Putnam, drawing the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital, tries to address the pernicious consequences of certain kinds of social capital. But what might these additional categories be? Working class social capital and capitalist social capital? Those terms strike us as ludicrous, and to even suggest them only further emphasizes the problem with using the term social capital to describe such a wide range of social relations. Moreover, the breadth of the concept of social capital, combined with the normative role that Putnam assigns to it, makes it difficult to see the complex interactions of networks and relationships. Relationships and networks do not simply have either pro-social or anti-social consequences. Sometimes relationships may interact or evolve in such a way that social capital might be initially understood as anti-social—or understood as anti-social in a particular context—and come to be seen as pro-social. It is simply impossible to talk normatively about social capital in general terms and still adequately grasp the complex nuances of social relationships. As these comments suggest, when social capital with positive consequences is given a shorthand name, such as trust or connectedness (a shorthand Putnam routinely employs), then that language makes it extremely difficult to explain how non-collaborative, suspicious, nontrusting, conflictive relationships might also enhance democracy, create healthy individuals, or improve the lot of the disadvantaged. Again, the

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IAF provides an instructive example. Where Alinsky advocated “social surgery not cosmetic cover-ups,” the language of social capital implies rebuilding and reweaving as the key to action. Does this change of language indicate that conflictive action aimed at tearing down relationships of oppression is no longer necessary? We think not. Yet, while Cortes may acknowledge the importance of conflict, it is very difficult for him to talk about it in the language of social capital. Not Thinking About Capitalism By minimizing those crucially important characteristics of action that are based on conflict and by smoothing out social contradictions and obscuring history, the term social capital serves to function ideologically. Terms function ideologically, according to Iris Young, when they “represent the institutional context in which they arise as natural or necessary . . . [forestalling] criticism of relations of domination and oppression, and [obscuring] possible more emancipatory social arrangements.”54 This is exactly what the term social capital does, as is indicated by the agenda for social capitalists that constitutes the concluding chapter of Bowling Alone. Putnam’s language blurs the historic meaning of the word capitalist by describing those who promote and/or participate in community service, family-friendly workplaces, the new urbanism, socially responsible religious activities, community dance troupes, campaign finance reform and, of course, bowling leagues as social capitalists. His language also fosters the view that this extraordinarily wide range of practices exemplify what capitalists do and what capitalism is about. For activities as different as dance troupes, religious organizations, bowling leagues, and familyfriendly workplaces to exemplify capitalism is to help make it appear part and parcel of the human condition, i.e., as natural and necessary in Young’s words. Moreover, to the extent dance troupes, religious organizations, bowling leagues, and family-friendly workplaces are generally seen as good things, the term social capital not only makes capitalism seem natural and inevitable, but something to which it is difficult to take exception. Thus, the term social capital helps legitimate capitalism. To suggest further how the term social capital functions ideologically, we draw on Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and the literature it has spawned on what is often called the dominant ideology thesis. By most accounts, there is little evidence for what Bottomore has called a strong version of this thesis, i.e., that the ideology of dominant classes and strata is sufficient to secure the social integration of subordinate classes and strata.55 Rather, as Gramsci noted, the consciousness of subordinate


classes and strata is typically “contradictory,” drawing upon their experience with subordination, exploitation, resistance, and struggle but still bearing witness, as Stokes has noted, to the “ability of the dominant to leave a deep mark on the consciousness and perceived interests of the dominated.”56 One aspect of that deep mark reflects what Bottomore calls a weak version of the dominant ideology thesis, the ability of a hegemonic ideology to “inhibit and confuse the development of the counter ideology of a subordinate class.”57 The language of social capital does just that. By describing the political resources of ordinary citizens, the poor, and the working class as merely another form of capital and by applying the word capital to bowling leagues, dance troupes, church groups, and a wide range of other institutions, the term social capital makes it more difficult than it would be otherwise to conceptualize political and social life in a vocabulary other than that associated with capitalism. That difficulty helps, as Bottomore indicates, inhibit the development of ideological challenges to capitalism. Of course, Putnam, Cortes, Coleman, and others who use the term social capital have no obligation to challenge capitalism. Our argument is independent of whatever views these writers may have on the merits of capitalism. We are simply calling attention to the fact that the term social capital has consequences for, to use Nancy Fraser’s words, the unspoken assumptions, connotations, and taken-for-granted beliefs about capitalism. In fact, given that the merits of capitalism have been the focus of considerable controversy during the past one hundred fifty years, it is striking that, the voluminous size of the social capital literature notwithstanding, so little attention has been paid to the possibility that the term might just have some ideological consequences. That one of the most prominent and honored political scientists in the United States can apply the term social capital to working-class solidarity and call upon all citizens to become social capitalists without discussing whether his language may have ideological consequences exemplifies this lack of attention. The lack of attention to these ideological considerations by the scholar most prominently associated with social capital as well as a similar lack of attention by many other writers contributes to the term’s functioning as a keyword in society at large and thus playing the ideological role that it does. An Alternative to Social Capital In addition to indicating the ideological consequences of the term social capital, we have argued that the term impedes scholarly inquiry

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in several different ways. First, by suggesting that social and financial capital are merely different species of the same genus, capital, the term social capital ignores the extent to which social capital is constituted by financial capital as well as the extent to which access to financial capital confers social and political advantages that are profoundly different from those conferred by access to social capital. Second, to view the preconditions of democracy and civic engagement in terms of social capital is to foster the view that these activities are forms of economic activity, thus depriving these activities of much of their distinctive meaning. Third, given that the word capital is historically associated with individualism and the pursuit of wealth, to view civic engagement and the resources of the economically disadvantaged as social capital is to obscure the meaning of words such as capitalist and solidarity. Fourth, when applied to many aspects of political activity, the term social capital largely ignores the historical context that gives this activity its meaning. These arguments make a compelling case for scholars of all normative persuasions to avoid the term social capital and seek alternative terms for studying these processes and relations, which, we agree, are certainly worth studying. How these alternatives are best conceptualized and phrased is a complicated issue beyond the scope of this chapter, which is more concerned with critiquing today’s vocabulary than providing a dictionary for tomorrow’s. Nonetheless, we can begin a discussion of possible alternatives by suggesting that capital in the term social capital be replaced by capacity. As is the case with capital, capacity calls attention to the aspects of social structure that can be conceptualized as provisions for the future and that facilitate individuals’ actions. To be sure, capacity does not allow a facile conceptual trinity of economic/human/social capital. But absent a specific context—which can be supplied equally well for social capacity or social capital—the latter’s theoretical pretensions do more to retard inquiry than advance it. We summarize our argument by comparing it with the analysis developed by Portes in the review article cited earlier. As probably befits an article written by a president of the American Sociological Association, the article deals, as the title indicates, with the origins and applications of social capital in modern sociology. It concludes by saying that “as a label for the positive effects of sociability, social capital has, in my view, a place in theory and research,” but several sentences earlier, it also notes that the concept’s popularity is: partially exaggerated for two reasons. First, the set of processes encompassed by the concept are not new and have been studied under other


labels in the past. Calling them social capital is, to a large extent, just a means of presenting them in a more appealing conceptual garb.58

Perhaps social capital would provide more appealing conceptual garb for studies about the causes, consequences, and characteristics of sociability. However, for inquiries into the public and political aspects of human activity—and such inquiries are necessarily a part this activity—the garb may have the sheen of silk but the analytic and ideological sows’ ears woven deeply into the semantic fabric of the term social capital render the garment unbecoming.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on S. S. Smith and J. Kulynych, “It May Be Social, but Why Is It Capital? The Social Construction of Social Capital and the Politics of Language,” Politics & Society, 30 (1) (2002), 149–86. 2. R. D. Putnam, “1996: The Civic Enigma,” The American Prospect (June 2005), http://www.prospect.org/web/page (accessed December 9, 2005). The earlier analysis appeared in R. D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone,” Journal of Democracy, 6 (1) (1995), 65-78. 3. R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 22–24. 4. H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 5. R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, Chapter 24. 6. Ibid., 359. 7. D. McNally, “Language, History, and Class Struggle,” in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, E. M. Wood and J. B. Foster (eds.) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 39. 8. N. Fraser and L. Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’,” in Justice Interruptus, N. Fraser (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1997), 122. Their discussion of keywords draws upon Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 9. R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19. For a fuller history of the term and concept, see James Farr, “Social Capital: A Conceptual History,” Political Theory, 31 (2003), 1–28. 10. P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, La Reproduction (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970); P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977). 11. P. Bourdieu, “Ökonomishes Kapital, Kulturelles Kapital, Soziales Kapital,” in Soziale Ungleichheiten, R. Kreckel (ed.) (Goettingen: Otto Schartz & Co, 1983); P. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

Research for the Sociology of Education, J. G. Richardson (ed.) (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1985). P. Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 242. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 252. J. S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 300. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 304. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 304. B. Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory (Routledge: New York, 2001), 53. R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); “Bowling Alone,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1) (1995), 65–78; “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 28 (4) (1995), 664–83; Bowling Alone. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 241, footnote 20. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19. Putnam cites Bourdieu along with Hanifan, Coleman, and others to indicate how “the term social capital itself turns out to have been independently invented at least six times over the twentieth century, each time to call attention to the ways in which our lives are made more productive by social ties.” That Putnam can so casually talk of our lives being made productive indicates how fully he adopts Coleman’s conception of social capital and ignores Bourdieu’s concern with how differential access to social capital helps reproduce prevailing patterns of wealth, status, and power. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 185. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 349. Ibid., 351. Ibid., 359. Edwards and Foley, “Civil Society and Social Capital Beyond Putnam,” American Behavioral Scientist 42 (1998), 128. Ibid., 124. A. Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology, 24 (1998), 15. Ibid. J. S. Coleman, “Norms as Social Capital,” in Economic Imperialism: The Economic Method Applied Outside the Field of Economics, G. Radnitzky and P. Bernholz (eds.) (New York: Paragon House, 1987). A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). T. J. Lowi, “The State in Political Science. How We Became What We Study,” American Political Science Review, 86 (1)(1992), 5.


36. J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vols. I and II (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); J. Cohen and J. Rogers, On Democracy (New York: Penguin, 1983); I. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 37. Lowi, “The State,” Political Science, 5. 38. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 12. 39. Urban Affairs Association, Urban Affairs, (June 1998), 5. 40. Putnam, Bowling Alone. 41. A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 42. I. Young, “Difference as a Resource in Democratic Communication,” in Deliberative Democracy, J. Bohman and W. Rehg (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 43. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. 44. R. Chaplin, “Solidarity Forever,” (1915), as quoted in J. L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1988), 26–27. 45. Ibid. 46. J. R. Salter, Jr., “Ralph Chaplin,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, M. J. Buhle, P. Buhle, and D. Georgakas (eds.) (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 127. 47. J. L. Kornbluh, “Industrial Workers of the World,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, Buhle et. al.(eds.), 355. 48. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 12. 49. S. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1989[1946]), 133–35. 50. E. Cortes, “Reweaving the Fabric: The Iron Rule and the IAF Strategy for Power and Politics,” in Interwoven Strategies, H. Cisneros (ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), 305. 51. Ibid., 316. 52. Ibid., 319. 53. Ibid., 305. 54. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 74. 55. T. Bottomore, “Introduction” to N. Abercrombie, S. Hill, and B.S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980s). 56. S. C. Stokes, “Hegemony, Consciousness, and Political Change in Peru,” Politics & Society,19 (3) (1991), 287. 57. Bottomore, “Introduction,” x. 58. Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” 21.

Chapter 4

Moving Beyond Vagueness: Social Capital, Social Networks, and Economic Outcomes Russell Williams

conomists’ understandings of labor markets have gone through several transformations in the last three decades as search theory and spatial mismatch hypotheses have joined human capital theory as major avenues for labor market research. Each of these advances was intended to improve the match between theory and observed dynamics of labor supply, and each posed important contrasts with the explanatory frameworks that had previously held ascendance in labor market research. But in recent decades, as these three modes of inquiry have been theoretically and empirically developed, the importance of social context as a factor in labor market outcomes has become increasingly apparent. Since 1990, elements of research into each of these theories have been converging with a growing social science inquiry into social networks. Understanding the dynamics of social networks is consequently an important area for further improvements in labor market theory. Labor market theory’s growing focus on social networks mirrors the growing recognition of the importance of “social capital” in the field of economic development. Spurred by the work of Robert Putnam and others,1 writings about both local economic development

E


and international economic development have invoked various concepts of social capital to explain how some markets for goods and services operate, why some markets fail to operate well, and why some local and/or national economies are more successful than others. While there is a general awareness that social networks and social capital are related terms, a precise relationship between the two concepts is often missing. Readers of the various literatures may not easily ascertain whether the terms are different, how they are related, and—if they are synonymous—why “networks” are emphasized in the labor economics literature, while “capital” is emphasized in the economic development literature. A perusal of the literature will also rapidly make one aware of the multiplicity of research questions and contexts in which the terms “social capital” and “social networks” have been used. Articles incorporating these concepts have included studies on the role of trust in economies, research about the influence of peer groups and families on preference formation, studies of networks as sources of information and influence, and other subjects. The human focal points to which the concepts of social networks and social capital have been applied include both individuals (for example, in the sense of the social networks available to a person) and groups of people (for example, in the sense of behavioral norms or trust within a group). Furthermore, in the literature as a whole, various authors ask their readers to consider different social capital content and different combinations of social dynamics within the environment that holds this social capital content. In some works the term “social capital” has been used as a synonym for unspecified relationships between people, in other works it obviously refers to specific relational structures by which particular things of value are transmitted, while in still other writings it is intended to denote an attribute of an individual or a group resulting from the networks of social relationships. Adding to the potential confusion faced by readers would be their finding that within the literature, the specific definitions of social capital and social networks given by different authors vary considerably. This variation in usage and definition has caused some theorists to question the conceptual cohesion of the terms and some theorists to deplore ways in which the terminology has spread. For example, Portes (1998) warns that, “the point is approaching at which social capital comes to be applied to so many events and in so many different contexts as to lose any distinct meaning.”2 Schuller, Baron, and Field declare that “social capital has several adolescent characteristics: it is neither tidy nor mature; it can be abused, analytically and politically; its future is unpredictable;

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but it offers much promise.”3 Lin states that, “divorced from its roots in individual interactions and networking, social capital becomes merely another trendy term to employ or deploy in the broad context of improving or building social integration and solidarity.”4 Durlauf and Fafchamps write, “while conceptual vagueness may have promoted the use of the term [social capital] among the social sciences, it [vagueness] also has been an impediment to both theoretical and empirical research of phenomena in which social capital may play a role.”5 Some researchers have addressed this problem by specifying the context within which they apply their conclusions about social capital. Szreter advises that, “[social capital] is manifest through certain kinds of attitudes and dispositions towards fellow-citizens and civic institutions, through networks of contact and association and through participation in civic and public institutions. Empirical work which aims to measure and quantify can observe social capital indirectly and inferentially, through examining the character and incidence of these phenomena. But ideally considerable contextual knowledge is required for unambiguous interpretation.”6 However, resorting to context for interpretation of social capital can pose many problems for prescribing public policy. A particular research context of variables and social dynamics examined by a social scientist is straightforwardly meaningful for public policy in a real-life setting only if the forces that are studied can be expected to dominate other dynamics when a more comprehensive set of existing forces is included. Similarly, the particular context examined by a researcher is meaningful for other areas only when the conclusions drawn from the analysis can be extrapolated to other situations. Some other researchers have addressed problems in the application of the social capital concept by adding modifiers to the term “social capital.” For example, one author discussing labor market theory has adopted the phrase “extensive social capital” as a way of incorporating the finding that job search is most successful when the social contacts are people who are outside one’s usual circle of friends—Granovetter has called these “weak links.” But it is important to note that the problems of social capital context and definition still apply—one researcher’s “extensive social capital” in job search using weak links may correspond with another researcher’s description of lesser social capital if the second researcher is measuring shared norms and trust. Possible adjectives like extensive, striated, or fragmented are themselves problematic and subject to multiple interpretations, since the quantity and quality of one form of social capital does not necessarily extrapolate to other forms of social capital.


For economists and other social scientists who are accustomed to thinking about the three other commonly cited forms of capital (physical capital, financial capital, and human capital), there is another subtle but important issue in the concept of social capital. It is commonly assumed that physical, financial, and human capital possess the characteristic that “more” is likely to lead to “better” outcomes, and in most real-world applications the merit of this assumption is fairly straightforward. However, for social capital the connection between “more” and “better” outcomes is much more complicated. Consider the following. In an urban environment, there are often many social institutions and considerable social interaction. However, many institutions and interactions may be striated along racial and ethnic lines. African American families may interact mainly with other African American families, while Latino families interact mainly with other Latino families, and White families interact mainly with other White families. In this type of situation, it may not be straightforward at all to assess who has “social capital” and who doesn’t. Each group’s social capital may be different in important ways, and whether one family’s social capital is “more” than another family’s may depend upon the particular types of social forces and outcomes that are the subject of inquiry. Imagine a second scenario. In a particular city, many jobs are filled through word of mouth (as is described later in this essay). In this city African Americans are as likely to use social networks to find jobs as Whites are and have equivalent success in finding jobs. However, as has been empirically shown that African Americans who use other African American contacts in their successful job search are likely to have lower wages than White job searchers who use other Whites as contacts, or African American searchers who use Whites—even if there is no difference in the education of the searchers. Like the first scenario, this scenario indicates that interpreting social capital can depend upon the context of the researcher’s inquiry—and that a finding of substantial social capital in one respect may not translate into “better” social capital in other respects. Finally, imagine a young man who is a member of an urban gang. This gang has strong norms, values, and trust among its members. Once again, it appears that the social capital of this young man depends upon the dimensions along which we evaluate his networks. It is not the absence of social capital—in the form of norms, group values, and trust—that presents problems for the young man. Rather the potential problems arise from the relationship of these norms, values, and trust to those held by the culture at large, the ways in which the social capital is


implemented, and the ways in which the societal institutions present in that area function. How then, can one conceptualize the important insights about social context that are found in the social capital and social network literature in ways that provide for more precise interpretations that can apply across disciplines, situations, and time periods? The next three sections immediately following this paragraph describe the emergence of the importance of social networks in search, spatial mismatch, and human capital theory respectively, providing the reader with a perspective on the growing importance of social networks in labor market theory to add to the more well-known summaries of social capital in local and international economic development theory. The subsequent section discusses the relationship between social networks and social capital, illuminating the common conceptual foundation of the two terms and addressing the rhetorical tendencies behind their usage in much of the literature. That section then calls upon the work done by a virtually forgotten analyst of networks, J. Clyde Mitchell, to provide a framework for clarifying various social network and social capital dynamics. Resurrecting and modifying the work of this scholar provides tools for articulating the important distinctions between the various forces discussed in the social capital and social network literature. It also establishes fertile ground for analyzing the impacts of social context and public policy interventions on economic outcomes in a more precise fashion than is done in most of the current social capital literature. Social Networks in the Search Theory Research Agenda Although some aspects of the search model were discussed as early as 1939, search theory did not receive major extended interest until the work of Stigler (1962), Mortensen (1970), and McCall (1970). The basic model has spawned prolific writing ever since.7 Search theory has been the chief expositor of the uncertainty about job offers faced by those who seek employment. Search theory does away with the assumption of informational certainty (implicit in much of the earlier labor market theory), replacing it with the idea of sequential decision-making job search amid uncertain environments. The job-seeker decision involves the tradeoffs between current offers, further time-consuming search, and the possibility of higher-wage offers on the other. Reservation wages play an important part in this theory, linking the intuitive idea that some offers will be rejected as too low with the fact that mathematical theories of optimal stopping conclude that the best strategy is to adopt the first


offer above the reservation wage—a wage level that the job-searcher does not regard as too low.8 Search theory has been very useful in illuminating aspects of unemployment duration, job/worker matching, turnover, and other features of the labor market. However, as search theory has advanced, there has also been growing examination of some of its own assumptions. Is the arrival of job offers a completely stochastic phenomenon? To what extent do individuals operate independently, and to what extent do they act in ways that reflect connection to others? For example, after a comprehensive review of the search literature in their classic book, Empirical Labor Economics: The Search Approach, Devine and Kiefer conclude, “looking across studies, we have found evidence that the empirical (and theoretical) work on search would benefit from changes of emphasis . . . There are definite advances to be made in studying the process by which workers get offers.”9 In more detailed comments, they state, “the simplest search models assume that the probability that a worker will get an offer in a given period is fixed. We note direct and indirect evidence that offer arrivals vary across workers and that search intensity varies as well. Indeed, one recurring impression from studies on the supply and demand sides of the labor market is that variation in offers across individuals is more important in explaining variation in unemployment durations than is variation in reservation wages. Our notes for future research emphasize the need to understand the process by which offers are made (as a result of efforts of workers and firms alike), as a complement to the current focus on the process by which offers are accepted. Demand and equilibrium are essentially wide open topics.”10 (italics added) Recently, search theory researchers have increasingly incorporated aspects of social context, with a particular emphasis on information channels, into their discussions. Descriptive studies of job search have given a central role to the distinction between formal channels of obtaining jobs (such as employment agencies, trade unions, etc.) and informal channels (such as referrals from employees and door-to-door search). In empirical studies of job search, references to information channels have become common as part of researchers’ speculation about factors contributing to their findings. Social Networks in the Spatial Mismatch Research Agenda The role of social context has also emerged as a major factor in spatial mismatch studies. In contrast to search theory’s emphasis on stochastic


models of arrivals of job offers, spatial mismatch analyses focus on racial and locational differences in labor supply. First articulated in 1965 by John Kain as a set of interrelated hypotheses about inner city employment, spatial mismatch analyses concentrated on the relationship between housing discrimination, business locations, and employment outcomes for inner-city Blacks (some of the more recent literature has addressed the spatial implications of employment for Latinos and Asians as well). The spatial mismatch hypothesis, as originally presented, asserts that the low employment rates of inner-city Blacks are a result of past and present housing discrimination combined with the movement of low-skilled jobs from central cities to more distant parts of the metropolitan area as transportation possibilities improved in the distant areas. According to spatial mismatch, the relocation of manufacturing and retailing made it more difficult and costly to reach low-skill jobs from urban residences, while widespread housing discrimination allowed Whites, but not Blacks, to follow the jobs as they moved. Consequently, according to the spatial mismatch reasoning, there are differences in geographic access to job opportunities that manifest themselves in higher unemployment of Blacks. While there is general agreement about the existence of suburban housing discrimination, the movement of manufacturing jobs away from cities, and the idea that these factors have an effect on employment of low-skilled workers, there has not been agreement on how much of a factor these dynamics play in urban labor market outcomes. Researchers have disagreed about the relative causative importance of distance, on one hand, and labor market discrimination by employers on the other, and about whether it is geographic distance per se that explains urban employment, or whether other factors correlated with geographic distance hold more explanatory power. Social context is a key element of this debate, a point underscored in a 1991 study by Kathleen O’Regan and John Quigley emphasizing the need to conduct further research into the causative channels of spatial mismatch. The authors summarize spatial mismatch theory as follows: “access affects the employment opportunities and the employment probabilities of members of the workforce.”11 They take issue, however, with what they describe as the usual interpretation of “access,” which focuses on either linear distance or commute time. “This appears to be a very narrow definition of access,” they state, “a more plausible interpretation of access may be in terms of the cost of information rather than the cost of transportation . . . Yet until recently spatial aspects of the role of information have been almost completely ignored by economists.”12


O’Regan and Quigley hypothesized that “social isolation deprives residents of membership in information networks which would improve their chances for employment. Thus central city Blacks lack access to jobs due to their social, rather than geographic, distance.” Using data from the 1980 U.S. Census covering sixteen-to-nineteenyear-olds living at home in forty-seven of the fifty largest metropolitan areas, O’Regan and Quigley found that when family effects are analyzed in comparison with the more commonly analyzed spatial effects, the family effects are much more important than the spatial effects. Specifically, controlling for geographic location within the metropolitan area, there is an increased likelihood that a youth is employed if the parent is employed, and an increased likelihood of unemployment if the parent is unemployed. Similarly, the employment status of siblings is linked with the employment status of the youth and youth are more likely to be employed in a given industry if a parent is employed in that industry. O’Regan and Quigley assert that young people are the population segment most dependent upon networks for information and that “the most important source of information for these individuals is other family members.” They conclude that “the empirical work supports the hypothesis of information linkages through networks which affect employment outcomes.”13 The importance of social context and the convergence of the research agenda of spatial mismatch with inquiry into social networks is also manifested in a 1996 article by Harry Holzer (one of the most prolific writers about spatial mismatch) and Keith Ihlanfeldt. Using a survey of employer recruitment mechanisms in conjunction with data on Black employment, they find that “the general association between referral networks [used by employers] and distance [from Black neighborhoods] is striking, and seems to confirm that such networks are at least partly geographically based. In contrast, the relatively small estimated effects when recruiting is done through newspapers indicate that when firms choose to use this method in recruiting particular types of employees, they can overcome the adverse effects of distance by disseminating information over a wide geographic area. The role of information as a mechanism through which spatial effects sometimes operate is therefore suggested by these results.”14 In 1998, Richard Arnott assessed the status of the spatial mismatch hypothesis and summarized the current debates about spatial mismatch as being composed of two parts, the second one showing the critical role that social networks play in further development of the theoretical and empirical research of spatial mismatch. First, according to Arnott, the


spatial mismatch hypothesis debate includes a dispute over weak form/strong form interpretation of the hypothesis. He writes, “The strong form is that serious limitations on Black residential choice, combined with the steady dispersal of jobs from central cities is the only, or at least paramount factor causing the low rates of employment and low earnings of Afro-American workers.”15 Arnott described the second part of the debate as a dispute about causative channels. The literature on the spatial mismatch hypothesis has identified two broad channels through which the combination of housing discrimination and job suburbanization might adversely affect the labour market situation of blacks. The first is commuting costs . . . The second channel is job search which has three aspects: the difficulty a downtown resident encounters in obtaining information on suburban jobs, which is more severe the more prevalent is word-of-mouth-advertising; the possible importance of acquaintanceship and connections in obtaining a job; and the high transport and time costs of searching for a suburban job from a downtown residence. No doubt both channels are operative. But there is disagreement concerning how quantitatively important each is.”16

Other empirical insights continue to challenge researchers’ thinking about where, how, and under what conditions spatial mismatch is manifest. Some research on the Boston metropolitan area yields interesting findings. Like many cities, Boston has experienced loss of manufacturing firms to other locations and growth of new employment centers in suburban areas.17 Boston has also been the subject of previous spatial mismatch studies, with some authors supporting the applicability of the spatial mismatch hypothesis and others asserting that the hypothesis does not apply.18 But Boston also has an important exceptional profile for investigations of urban unemployment; it is one of very few cities in the United States where the number of jobs exceeds the number of residents.19 Furthermore, the areas of Boston with relatively high numbers of Black residents may have a different level of proximity to employment centers than in other cities. According to Cohn and Fossett, in Boston “blacks are physically near more jobs than Whites are. This finding holds despite analysis being restricted to consider only entry-level blue-collar jobs.” If a large number of entry-level job openings are near heavy concentrations of unemployment and are not being accessed, as Cohn and Fosset suggest, this strongly indicates that an important explanatory variable is missing from those spatial mismatch explanations that focus only on geographic proximity. If social networks play an important part


in employment levels, as suggested by O’Regan and Quigley, Holzer and Ihlanfeldt, and Arnott, both the theory and empirical findings of spatial mismatch may be advanced by further theoretical and empirical work on the impact of social networks. The Emergence of the Concept of “Opportunity Structures” as a Social-Network-Aware Alternative to “Human Capital” Research agendas stemming from the process by which people acquire skills have also become intertwined with research into social networks. The most widely known concept intended to express acquisition of skills is “human capital” and this term in its narrow sense refers to the idea that people “invest” in the building of skills and other attributes related to productivity.20 The idea that people may spend on themselves looking to the future is not controversial. However, “human capital” has become heavily critiqued because of its association with what can be called “the Human Capital Theory” since the introduction of that theory by Mincer (1958), Schultz (1960), and Becker (1964). Human Capital Theory is a series of related hypotheses about the relationship between choice, productivity, and income. The original theoretical assertions, as presented by Jacob Mincer, were that differences in earnings were explained by individuals’ investment in their human capital and that “the process of investment is subject to free choice.”21 The application of the term “human capital” was expanded two years later by Theodore Schultz. In his 1960 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Schultz continued the emphasis on the links between human capital investment and productivity, urging attention to five forms of human capital investment—health, formal education, on-the-job training, adult study programs, and migration. In this address and in his subsequent 1961 article in the American Economic Review, Schultz emphasized that not only individuals but also various social institutions invest in human capital.22 Subsequently, Gary Becker expanded on the assertions about the link between choice, skill development, productivity, and wages (with an emphasis on on-the-job-training) in a 1962 article and in his well-known 1964 book, Human Capital. Research associated with the Human Capital Theory expanded in the 1970s and since then has been a conceptual framework for many works in labor economics, economic development, and other fields. But from the time that Mincer’s paper appeared through the present, critiques emerged about numerous aspects of the implicit and explicit content and


reasoning within the Theory. A wide variety of criticisms emerged about the links between choice, access to human capital development opportunities, the quality of teaching available, the nature of skill-building, job requirements, racial and gender discrimination in employment opportunities, and earnings.23 While the idea that people invest in the building of skills and other attributes related to future income and other future goals remains a central idea within labor economics, factors that critics have emphasized as alternatives (or additions) to the original Human Capital Theorists’ explanations of wage differentials, productivity, and decision-making, have been parental resources, cultural factors, learning from peer groups, variations in school quality, variations in the education agendas of schools, social expectations, role models, race, gender, unionization, and many other dynamics. As Stephen Steinberg summarized, “the pitfall of the human capital approach is not in exploring human factors that yield economic dividends, but in treating these factors in a vacuum, apart from the constellation of historical, political, social, and economic factors with which they are inextricably bound.”24 This has led some theorists to seek alternative ways of presenting the relationship between choice and economic outcomes. In 1995, George Galster and Sean Killen proposed an alternative conceptual framework for understanding the links between choice and the goals for which forward-looking investment is pursued.25 Galster and Killen’s framework identifies “process” and “prospect” dimensions of opportunity, calling these “opportunity structures” and “opportunity sets.” They explain: The process dimension of opportunity refers to the way markets, institutions, and service delivery systems (e.g., the social welfare or educational system, legal and illegal labor markets, the criminal justice system, or the housing market) utilize and modify the innate and acquired characteristics of participants. The panoply of markets, institutions, and systems that act on and convert personal attributes into outputs affecting social advancement we call the “opportunity structure.” . . . The prospect dimension of opportunity refers to the prospective socioeconomic outcomes (likely streams of future income, consumption, and utility) that people believe will occur if they make particular decisions regarding education or work, for instance. These estimated outcomes will be influenced both by the person’s indelible endowments (e.g., race) and by acquired attributes (e.g., education). But they are also shaped by the person’s subjective perceptions of how the opportunity structure will judge and (perhaps) transform these attributes . . . that person’s opportunity set.


With regard to the objective aspects of opportunity, Galster and Killen emphasize the contextual interaction between personal attributes and system structures. “The opportunity structure specifies which personal characteristics matter and to what degree in opening up or limiting economic prospects of individuals.” Social networks are recognized as playing key roles in opportunity structures: “Especially important in the opportunity structure are local social networks . . . which shape the normative and informational context of decision making.” (italics added) Social networks also play an important role in opportunity sets. Galster and Killen call attention to “two crucial assumptions implicit in our conceptual models: (1) that decisions are made on the basis of perceived opportunities and (2) that decisions are influenced by social networks and conditions manifesting themselves at the neighborhood scale.”26 They also note the important role of these networks for youth. “Perceptions of options and prospective payoffs . . . are not formed in a social vacuum; on the contrary, both firsthand experience with and secondhand information about the opportunity structure are potent determinants of values and aspirations.”27 Social Networks and Social Capital—Moving Beyond Vagueness As the previous pages show, the information channels and norms emphasized by social networks and social capital are at the cutting edge of several aspects of current labor market theory. Clarity about these terms is essential for the quality of future theoretical and practical discourse on labor markets, education, economic development, inequality, and other topics in economics. This section discusses the conceptual foundations and rhetorical uses of “social capital” and “social networks” before moving to discussion of ways to clarify the various social forces examined by social scientists and the public policy discourse that emerges from studies of social capital. The term “social capital” was used by the urban scholar Jane Jacobs in 1961, re-emerged in writings by the economist Glenn Loury in 1977,28 and was more broadly articulated and more widely popularized by the sociologist James Coleman in 1988.29 The image of “social networks” underlies the concept of social capital, as was evidenced in the descriptions that Jacobs and Loury gave for social capital. Jacobs wrote, “networks are a city’s irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated.”30 Similarly, looking back upon his influential 1977 article, Loury reflected:


In earlier work, I introduced the term “social capital” to suggest a modification of the standard human capital theory in economics. My modification was intended to provide a richer context within which to analyze racial inequality. I formalized the observation that family and community backgrounds can play an important role, alongside factors like individual ability and human capital investments, in determining individual achievement . . . Because access to developmental resources is mediated through racesegregated social networks, an individual’s opportunities to acquire skills depend on present and past attainments by others in the same racial group.31

Thus, as has been recognized by some recent scholars,32 social networks are key aspects of social capital. The connections between people and the patterns that these connections form—both of which lend themselves to the visual metaphor of networks—constitute the media within which social capital exists. The basic concept behind the term social capital is the idea that various non-physical things of value (positive or negative) linked to economic outcomes are contained in relationships between people. Accordingly, each use of the social capital concept involves either the transmission of some non-physical content through relationships, or the exercise of the non-physical content within relationships as part of achieving an outcome. This dual possibility of transmission through networks and exercise of content in networks lies behind some of the confusion about social capital. Writings that focus on transmission of content, such as the study of the role of information and referrals in recent labor market literature, tend to use the terminology of social networks, while writings that focus on the exercise of content within relationships, such as the study of shared norms and trust in the economic development literature, tend to refer to social capital. Yet each is a reflection of the existence, economic significance, and use of networks. Various authors tend to give definitions of social capital and social networks that fit their immediate emphases and purposes. In some literature the emphasis is on ties between individuals. In other literature the emphasis is on ties between individuals and groups, while others focus on networks between groups. Still other studies focus upon ties between individuals or groups and various political, religious, or community institutions. Recognizing that all of these involve networks of relationships clarifies part of the confusion around social capital. However, part of the complexity of the network concept usage is that in many cases it is invoked not as a precise definition but instead as a heuristic device to leverage other larger socioeconomic understandings. As noted several decades ago by Charles Tilly, social scientists have used


the language of social networks not only in attempts to articulate precise meanings, but also, in many cases, to gain rhetorical leverage to get their reading audiences to consider various understandings about the impact of social context on the subjects they studied. Tilly stated: In recent years, sociologists, anthropologists and other students of social behavior have made considerable use of the network metaphor . . . In fact they have made three different uses of it: as a peg, as a witching wand, and as a blueprint . . . writers have used the network analogy simply to indicate that they were dealing with sets of social relationships which did not fall neatly into bounded groups . . . without precisely identifying the relationship(s) which define the network.

He concludes his typology of the rhetorical use of the network metaphor, stating that “a blueprint provides a simplified but precise representation of the object at hand.”33 J. Clyde Mitchell also discussed the range of metaphorical uses of the network concept and the lack of specificity in many writings. Concerned about the overall advancement of the social network research agenda, Mitchell noted that the diversity of uses had created difficulty in labeling, comparing, and analyzing different dynamics addressed in social network literature. Mitchell argued for greater precision in the description of network characteristics. The image of “network of social relations” to represent a complex set of inter-relationships in a social system has had a long history. This use of “network,” however, is purely metaphorical and is very different from the notion of a social network as a specific set of linkages among a defined set of persons . . . As a metaphor, the notion of “network” subsumes, and therefore obscures, several different aspects of social relationships such as connectedness, intensity and status and role. But the metaphorical use of the word, however common it is, should not prevent us from appreciating that it is possible to . . . use the concept in more specific and defined ways.34

To achieve greater descriptive and analytical precision, Mitchell proposed that all network dynamics could be described in reference to two broad categories, morphology and interaction, comprising nine specific characteristics. Mitchell’s contribution to social network theory appears to have been lost or overlooked by many current theorists. His book is not mentioned in the thirty pages of references in Social Capital: Critical Perspectives (2000) by Baron, Field, and Schuller; neither is it mentioned in the references for any of the twelve essays contained in Social Capital:


Theory and Research (2001) edited by Lin, Cook, and Burt; nor is it mentioned in the references for any of the nineteen Working Papers for the World Bank’s Social Capital Initiative. His ideas deserve resurrection so that different researchers’ uses of “social capital” and “social networks” can be compared within an overall framework, adequately discussed in terms of different social capital/social network dynamics that may overlap, enhance each other, or act counter to each other, and ultimately so that the ideas generated in the literature can be translated into effective public policy. As descried by Mitchell, the first characteristic of networks, “anchorage,” refers to the fact that “normally a network must be traced from some initial starting point; it must be anchored on a reference point.” 35 In some studies, the reference point is on the individuals, in others it is on the affinity groups, while in still others it is on the even larger units of population. The second characteristic listed by Mitchell is “reachability” (it can also be thought of as “access”), which he describes as “the extent to which [a person] can use . . . relationships [with others] to contact people who are important to him or alternatively, the extent to which people who are important to him can contact him through these relationships.” Mitchell’s third category, “density,” is the degree to which “a large proportion [of a set of persons] know one another . . . Density . . . is used in the sense in which completeness is used in graph theory, i.e., the extent to which links which could possibly exist among persons do in fact exist.” The last morphological characteristic is “range,” a characteristic that is applicable only when the network is anchored on a person. Range is the number of people in direct contact with the person on whom a network is anchored. Among the interactional elements of networks, Mitchell presents “content” as the first category; however, he actually refers to two types of content in his article, relational content and exchange content. The difference between these types is important enough to think of them as separate characteristics of content. Relational content comprises “the meanings which the persons in the network attribute to their relationships.” The other type—“exchange content”—Mitchell credits another author for articulating as “the overt elements of the transactions between individuals . . . which constitute their interaction.”36 The next interactional element is “directedness.” This feature of networks describes the flow of the interaction under study, specifically, “whether the relationship between the people in the network should be considered either as oriented from one to the other or reciprocal.” “Durability,” another interactional characteristic presented by Mitchell,


refers to the length of time in which a relationship persists (either in active or latent status). “Intensity” is “the degree to which individuals are prepared to honour obligations, or feel free to exercise the rights implied in their link to some other person.” Finally, “frequency” is the number of contacts between people in a network within a given period. Following Mitchell’s lead, it is possible to gain useful perspective on the overall universe of the social capital/social network literature and to compare the characteristics of individual studies or sets of studies to others. While all social capital/social network literature shares an emphasis on relationships, networks, and the exchange of valued content, differences in the research question being pursued, and the various social dynamics under study, manifest themselves within the literature as differences in the morphological features of networks, the interactional content being studied, and the characteristics of other interactional elements. Using Mitchell’s morphology and interaction framework, the labor market social network issues discussed early in this chapter no longer seem to be adrift in a morass of vague and arbitrarily changing definitions of social networks and social capital. Instead, the research question, “how do individuals find jobs?” that underlies this particular labor market literature, and the phenomenon under examination, i.e., the finding that most individuals find jobs through information provided by current employees at the hiring firm,37 have distinct implications for the morphology and interaction characteristics of social capital that are investigated. The labor market social networks are anchored on the individual job seeker rather than upon groups or communities that are the anchorage found in many of the trust-based or norms-based studies of social capital in the economic development literature.38 Range and reachability are important variables of the job seeker network, since the key dynamic for the job prospects of the job-seeker is the ability to have informational contact with currently employed workers. In other subjects of social capital investigation, reachability is also important in studies of the role of social capital in education and in studies of the creation and distribution of material resources;39 however, it is less important in studies focusing on norms and trust (since often the groups upon which the analysis is based are defined in terms of their already existing norms and trust). In contrast, density (the degree to which people with direct connections to an individual know each other) is an important aspect of norm- and trust-based social capital (since network density reinforces trust and norms). However, density is a possible impediment to the job seeker’s job-search networks. If the job seeker’s contacts all know each other, then the job seeker will quickly run out of new information.


The interactional dynamics of interest in studies of job search networks focus primarily on a unidirectional transfer of content—a transfer of information either to the job seeker or to the employer—rather than a bi-directional flow, as is the case with trust or norms (where contents include expressed value, sanctions, and visible behavior). While relational content is very important in the norm- and trust-based social capital studies (which often involve obligations through reciprocity or membership), relational content is not as important in job-search networks. Granovetter argues, for example, that weak ties (ties that have less content) may be more effective in job search than stronger ties.40 In job search networks, durability, intensity, and frequency are all less import than they are in the social capital literature that focuses on trust, norms, and skill development. Overall, the identification of differences in morphology and interaction capture the “feel” of different social capital studies while maintaining and explaining their common roots in networks. Conclusion Studies of social capital—the transmission of economically important content through social networks and the exercise of content existing within relationships—have important implications for our understandings about markets, for the accumulation of assets, and for other economic outcomes. A large body of literature has emerged recognizing this importance. However, discourse among scholars and the effective translation of theory and empirical research into effective public policy is still problematic and would greatly benefit from a framework that more effectively delineates the specific network characteristics under investigation. This essay presents such a framework. The task at hand is not only to expand insights about the interaction of economic outcomes and social content, but also—just as importantly for scholarly work—to avoid overstatement of findings, to build awareness of counter-moving dynamics within the various aspects of social capital, to limit misinterpretation of findings, and to prevent misapplication of concepts and research findings. Social capital is multifaceted and yet, within an appropriate framework, it has the potential to be an intellectually tractable accumulation of ideas that, with appropriate attention to content and contours, can yield better insights into many socioeconomic outcomes and possibilities. To achieve these goals, the research of the future must understand the unifying conceptual foundations of social capital and social networks, must be cognizant of—and explicit about—the varying forms that social networks may take when different subject matter is


being investigated, and must be critically aware of the ways in which the important forces of race, space, and inequality affect the morphology and interactional content of social networks. Notes 1. See R. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 61 (1995), 65–78. 2. A. Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology, 24, no. 1 (1998). 3. T. Schuller, et al., “Social Capital: A Review and Critique,” in Social Capital: Critical Perspectives, S. Baron, J. Field, and T. Schuller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. 4. N. Lin, “Building a Network Theory of Social Capital,” in Social Capital: Theory and Research, N. Lin, K. Cook, and R. Burt (eds.) (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2001), 9. 5. See S. Durlauf and M. Fafchamps, “Social Capital,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, P. Aghion and S. Durlauf (eds.) (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2006). 6. S. Szreter, “Social Capital, the Economy, and Education in Historical Perspective,” in Social Capital: Critical Perspectives (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), 58. 7. Summaries of the search approach literature have been written by Mortensen, Devine and Kiefer, and Lippman and McCall. 8. For the mathematical derivation of this conclusion, see Great Expectations: The Theory of Optimal Stopping, Y. S. Chow, et. al. (Dover Press, 1991) 9. T. Devine and N. Kiefer, Empirical Labor Economics: The Search Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 308. 10. Ibid., 9–10. 11. K. O’Regan and J. Quigley, “Labor Market Access and Labor Market Outcomes for Urban Youth,” Journal of Regional Science and Urban Economics 21 (1991), 278. 12. Ibid., 279. 13. Ibid. 14. H. Holzer and K. Ihlandfeldt, “Spatial Factors and the Employment of Blacks at the Firm Level,” New England Economic Review (May/June 1996). 15. R. Arnott, “Economic Theory and the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis,” Urban Studies 35, no. 7 (1998), 1172. 16. Ibid. 17. For a recent discussion of these changes, see Chapter 4 in The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space and Economic Change in an American Metropolis by B. Bluestone and M. Stevenson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000). 18. See Bluestone, et al. (1992) for a study supporting the existence of spatial mismatch in Boston, and Cohn and Fossett (1996) for a study concluding that spatial mismatch is not pertinent to Boston.


19. Source of information: conversation between author and Greg Perkins and John Avault of the Boston Redevelopment Authority Research Division, June 1997. 20. M. Blaug, The Methodology of Economics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 225. 21. J. Mincer, “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution,” Journal of Political Economy 56 (1958), 301; P. McNulty, The Origins and Development of Labor Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 193. 22. T. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” American Economic Review 51 (March 1961), 1–17. 23. J. Jacobsen, “Human Capital Theory,” in The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, J. Peterson and M. Lewis (eds.) (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999), 445. 24. S. Steinberg, “Human Capital: A Critique,” The Review of Black Political Economy, (Summer 1985), 69, 73. 25. G. Galster and S. Killen, “The Geography of Metropolitan Opportunity: A Reconnaissance and Conceptual Framework,” Housing Policy Debate 6, no. 1 (1995). 26. Ibid., 12. 27. Ibid., 36 28. G. Loury, “A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences,” in Women, Minorities and Employment Discrimination, P. Wallace and A. LaMond, (eds.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 153–88. 29. J. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” The American Journal of Sociology 94, Supplement P. S96 (1988). Coleman writes: “Social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity, but a variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: They all consist of some aspect of social structure, and they facilitate certain actions of actors who are within the structure. The term social capital signals to the analyst and to the reader that something of value has been produced for those actors who have this resource available and that the value depends on social organization.” 30. Jacobs, Life and Death of Great American Cities, 138. 31. Loury, Anatomy of Racial Inequality, 102–3. 32. For example, see Lin “Building a Network Theory of Social Capital” and Durlauf, “Social Capital.” 33. C. Tilly, Foreword, in Networks of Contact: The Portuguese and Toronto, Grace M. Anderson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1974), x–xiii 34. J. C. Mitchell, “The Concept and Use of Social Networks,” in Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns, J. Clyde Mitchell (ed.), (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 1–2. 35. Ibid., 11–12.


36. B. Kapferer, “Norms and the Manipulation of Relationships in a Work Context,” in Social Networks in Urban Situations, J. Clyde Mitchell (ed.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969). 37. See M. Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); J. Montgomery, “Social Networks and Labor-Market Outcomes: Toward an Economic Analysis,” American Economic Review, (December 1991); and R. E. Williams, “Social Networks and Labor Market Outcomes: Theoretical Expansions and Econometric Analysis,” (diss., University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2004). 38. See, for example, Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 171, 177. Putnam writes: “Trust lubricates cooperation. The greater the level of trust within a community, the greater the likelihood of cooperation . . . In all societies . . . dilemmas of collective action hamper attempts to cooperate for mutual benefit, whether in politics or in economics. Third party enforcement is an inadequate solution to this problem. Voluntary cooperation depends on social capital.” Also, P. Maskell, “Social Capital, Innovation, and Competitiveness” in Social Capital: Critical Perspectives, S. Baron, et. al. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111. Maskell states, “Social capital refers to the values and beliefs that citizens share in their everyday dealings and which give meaning and provide design for all sorts of rules.” 39. See, for example, J. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990), 300. Coleman writes, “social capital is the set of resources that inhere in family relations and in community social organization and that are useful for the cognitive or social development of a child or young person.” 40. See Granovetter, Getting a Job.

Chapter 5

Social Capital, Race, and the Future of Inner-City Neighborhoods James Jennings

ocial capital generally refers to individual, community, or familial networks that reflect substantive degrees of trust between the parties, and can be used to build, facilitate, or maintain cooperation for mutually beneficial economic, social, or political objectives. Social capital can take various forms.The concept of social capital has gained an explosive amount of attention in recent years in the fields of political science, urban affairs, and planning, as well as in the popular media.1 The American Journal of Planning devoted a symposium to this topic in 2004 titled, “Using Social Capital to Help Integrate Planning Theory, Research, and Practice.” The 1999 annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association was dedicated to the theme of social capital. A search on “social capital” in the papers database of the American Political Science Association shows that for the years 2003 and 2004 there were 1,079 formal presentations containing the phrase. This number surpassed phrases such as race (945), inequality (650), justice (992), injustice (262), empowerment (216), discrimination (570), and racism (182). Although it did not surpass the word “class” (1,119), social capital is now a key concept in research spanning many areas. Given this attention, how is social capital discussed in terms of continual racial and spatial inequalities in urban society? And how does this idea inform public policy regarding neighborhood revitalization or

S


local economic development? Also, is the building of social capital an effective alternative to class or neighborhood mobilization in struggles for equitable shares of social and economic benefits in urban society? Social capital has emerged as a popular response to these questions. Though focused on Finland, the claim of Hilde Coffee and Benny Geys is heard among scholars studying U.S. urban society: Social capital is indeed an important resource available to societies— next to human and physical capital—and is argued to have a beneficial influence on various economic, social and political phenomena . . . First, social capital improves performance . . . citizens become more active and effective in demanding good government where social capital is higher . . . Second . . . [it] generates a commitment within individuals to make their society work and increase their willingness to make necessary compromises.2

For example, in their chapter in this anthology, Turcotte and Silka note that, “increasingly the notion of strengthening a community’s economic base is being framed in terms of the language of social capital. Community development efforts have increasingly adopted the language of social capital as a way to understand what communities must do to prosper.”3 Advocates of social capital suggest that increasing it, or creating it, can enhance the economic prosperity of impoverished neighborhoods but it can also be useful for economic development in the international arena. Svendsen and Svendsen see social capital as the “missing link,” and they see nonmaterial productive factor as the basis of a new economic theory (dubbed Bourdieuconomics in honor of the late theorist of social capital, Pierre Bourdieu) that, through trust, facilitates entrepreneurship in some countries such as Denmark. Regarding the United States, Putnam proposes, “social capital is generally distributed unequally—more trusting, more joining, more voting, and so on— among the better-off segments of society. Citizens who lack access to financial and human capital also lack access to social capital.”4 Avis Vidal is more direct and argues that, “developing social capital (i.e., assets) for poor neighborhoods is one approach to the broader task of building community capacity.”5 She adds, “these neighborhoods are institutionally impoverished, as well; they have fewer formal organizations, and the ones that exist are less likely to provide access to opportunities for social, educational, and economic advancement than are comparable groups in suburban, middle-class communities.”6 In a similar vein, Light claims that “where poor people have social capital, they

SOCIAL CAPITAL, RACE, AND THE FUTURE 89

are better off. For instance, in neighborhoods whose residents have more organizational memberships, workers display a lower likelihood of long-term joblessness.”7 Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landolt write: “Liberals and conservatives alike now celebrate social capital as the key to success in a myriad of domestic issues—from public education, aging, and mental health to the battle against inner city crime and the rejuvenation of America’s small towns.”8 Michael Woolcock and Deepa Narayan argue that social capital, including family ties, friends, and associates, can be tapped or utilized or leveraged for material gains.9 Robert Putnam and Kristin Goss (2002) propose further, “social networks create value, both individual and collective.”10 Two other writers, Sirianni and Friedland, iterate the value of social capital for resolving economic problems facing innercity neighborhoods: “Social capital refers to those stocks of social trust, norms and networks that people can draw upon to solve common problems. Networks of civic engagement, such as neighborhood associations, sports clubs, and cooperatives, are an essential form of social capital, and the denser these networks, the more likely that members of a community will cooperate for mutual benefit.”11 Another group of researchers write that, “recent theoretical developments suggest that neighborhood social capital originates with the formation of bonds among residents, which in turn empower them to protect and pursue their collective interests as they engage external institutions and organizations that might help them to resist threats to their well-being.”12 They add, “bonding social capital is a necessary [my italics] antecedent for the development of the more powerful form of bridging social capital.”13 As such it can spell economic relief and greater communitarian harmony in inner-city neighborhoods. Social capital even has “capacity for storage,”14 according to Ivan Light. He proceeds to state, remarkably, that: social capital is a kind of philosopher’s stone that, costing no money and available even to the humble, can metamorphose into rare and precious values. The medieval alchemists sought to change lead into gold. They hoped to turn something valueless into something precious. They failed. It appears, however, that in social capital, the world has a nonmonetized resource that metamorphoses into money, property, education, and high culture.”15

Putnam tempers this hyperbole by noting that while social capital is a base for leadership and entrepreneurship, “hovering above individual leaders, and also influencing social capital, is the state.”16 In spite of this caveat, social capital is treated as the key factor in ensuring that poor


neighborhoods are wholesome. To quote Chupp, “in the debate over poor neighborhoods and the ills of society as a whole, social capital has become something of a wonder drug.”17 When social capital is presented as a wonder drug to alleviate the impact of structural inequalities, it thereby becomes a rhetorical mechanism that dismisses institutional and policy causes of structural inequalities. Smith and Kulynich show in their chapter that this very term, social capital, actually discourages structural analysis of social and economic issues. A similar point is made by Canadian political scientist Karen Bridgett Murray in her article. She notes that poverty is not approached as a part of broad political and economic institutions but rather on the basis of individual capacities. In other words, when issues like poverty, joblessness, teen pregnancy, poor public health, and inferior schooling are studied in reference to the particular level of social capital in a group or neighborhood, it essentially limits structural or class explanations and thereby dismisses consequent political mobilization aimed at resolving these problems as unnecessary.18 Although James DeFilippis (2001) raises a concern that urban scholars are placing too much emphasis on “how social capital can be generated in low-income communities in the United States,” social capital is now treated as a cultural and economic resource that is vital for responding to the effects of spatial and racial inequality.19 Social Capital and the End of Politics The current focus on social capital as a response to structural inequalities is problematic for several reasons. First, it is not a concept that can easily be measured and is therefore open to a wide range of definitions by researchers. Robert Silverman observes, “ironically, within the field of community development, social capital is a somewhat amorphous concept, although it retains a Teflon® quality. It is considered to be requisite for sustainable community development while its substance remains elusive.”20 This is why Andrew Greely states that, “the term ‘social capital’ has been misused and abused in American social science, with little regard for its precise meaning . . . ”21 The Teflon® quality of social capital can lead to unsupported claims. As noted by Durlauf and Fafchamps in their review of social capital as a factor explaining economic growth, “we argue that empirical social capital studies are often flawed and make claims that are in excess of what is justified by the statistical exercises reported.”22 Second, as Silverman points out, the mobilization of social capital is bound by the social context of its location. In essence, social capital is the product of values that are embedded in local context . . . there are no


generic forms of social capital that can be transferred from setting to another.”23 In other words, social capital is not uniform. Based on a study of community development corporations managed by Blacks and nonprofits managed by Whites in Jacksonville, Florida, Silverman discovered that these sectors held different values, perceptions about race, and race relations. The social capital evident in both cases was directly linked to organizational values and institutional perceptions that reflect the structural positions of both sectors. The social capital evident in both organizational settings, despite operating in similar spheres of activities, did not point toward collaboration or building enjoining networks. This weakness can be witnessed in the claim in “Inner-city Ills” in Civic Dictionary (2004): Urban renewal and public housing policies, along with the exodus of black middle classes from the inner city, have depleted stocks of social capital available, and thus impaired school performance, job referral, drug-and crime-avoidance, and self-help. Equal opportunity strategies and social welfare programs are unlikely to succeed unless they can be coupled with ways to replenish remaining stocks of social capital, such as those represented by the black church.24

This sweeping statement is inaccurate for two reasons. First, an exodus of the Black middle class is merely presumed. This is not the case in many inner cities. Second, it posits that social capital found in Black churches can automatically be applied to community problems. Recently, sociologist Omar M. Roberts found that the social networks in churches are not necessarily transferred or transferable toward alleviating neighborhood problems.25 His case study of churches in an area of Dorchester, a predominantly Black and low-income section of Boston, shows that in some instances these institutions see themselves as apart from the surrounding neighborhoods. The assertion above is also inaccurate because it ignores the rich institutional networks, businesses, neighborhood associations, and civic groups operating in many impoverished communities. What I refer to as the de-racialization of social capital is another problem under this topic. Some researchers ignore racial and ethnic differences in how social capital is reflected in a range of situations. Rodney E. Hero shares this concern. Most analyses of social capital do not adequately confront conditions associated with race; as a result, they come to conclusions more benign than a fuller assessment warrants. Social-capital analyses implicitly


emphasize absolute or aggregate indicators of equality and overlook or understate relative outcomes for minorities. They thus obscure important dimensions of the continuing inequality by race and mislead us in our thinking about equality and democracy in American politics.26

Hero utilizes census data to highlight the limitations of state- and national-level surveys measuring social capital and to show that social capital is not necessarily associated with racial equality. He concludes that a focus on social capital, and the extant methodologies for analyzing such, can limit and discourage discussions about continuing racial inequalities in U.S. society and that “by not disaggregating along racial lines, social-capital analyses incorrectly make strong, broad claims about the dynamics of equalization while masking what may be a situation of racial inequality.”27 Hero shows a disconnect between states with relatively high levels of social capital and conditions that suggest racial inequality in the areas of education, public health, and the criminal justice system. One could also rely on historical literature to show that social capital has actually been a force for racial and ethnic inequality in U.S. society. The Bedolla chapter in this anthology summarizes literature showing that social capital has a particular racial history in the United States. By referring to this literature, she describes many situations where social capital served as a glue to maintain solidarity among groups protecting various forms of white-skin privileges. The social base that cemented oppressive political policies and economic practices was precisely the bonding, trust, and cooperation among representatives of White interests. Bedolla writes, for example, that “many of the civic organizations Putnam mentions—Kiwanis, the Rotary Club, etc.—banned the participation of both women and people of color. If social capital is about building relationships within your community, these racially-biased programs have had important effects on what that community looked like and who (racially) was allowed to live in it. It makes intuitive sense, then, that race and race policies are intimately related to the creation and maintenance of community-level social capital in the United States.”28 In Plural but Equal, the late Harold Cruse describes numerous episodes in U.S. history of Blacks pursuing self help that reflected social capital in the form of strong bonds and trust within these groups. He documents widespread and vitriolic White resistance to Black self-help initiatives, both on the part of masses of Whites and institutional elites.29 The history of political machines provides other examples of how interests holding power sought to keep Black political challenges from


gaining saliency. These challenges emerged from the group consciousness of Black people seeking to establish social equality in U.S. society. Literature such as Ira Katznelson’s Black Men, White Cities (1973), Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (1966), or Kenneth Kusmer’s A Ghetto takes shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (1976), describe Black resistance to political machines who sought to keep local government as beneficial for White citizens loyal to the machine. These examples (and there are many more) show that when social capital represents a base for bonding but leads to political mobilization that challenges the status-quo interests—and its “gatekeepers”— threatened by impending change will resist it.30 The term gatekeepers is borrowed from Chavez and Fraga in their discussion of individuals and processes that have the capability of assisting or resisting social capital in communities of color from being utilized to gain group benefits.31 It is also discussed in the chapter by Bedolla in this collection. While these authors focus on contemporary gatekeepers, the concept and discussion is applicable to the behavior and responses of urban political machine leaders toward communities of color in earlier periods. Resistance on the part of gatekeepers was also directed at other groups of color, as well as the White working class. In Making Democracy Work Better, Richard A. Couto and Catherine S. Guthrie show how state government and private partners thwarted the building of social bonds between workers aligned against corporate power. By looking at the case of poverty-stricken areas in the Appalachia region of the United States the authors show that the building of social capital, or bonding among workers and poor people, was perceived as a serious problem for wealth and landowning interests.32 Finally, the call for social capital as a strategy for improving living conditions is problematic because it presupposes apathy and civic disconnectedness with inner-city neighborhoods. In fact, “there is an assumption that, whatever the state of engagement is in general, it must be worse for African Americans and for Hispanics, who are certainly thought to be less connected, less civically engaged, and less wellequipped to compete in mainstream political processes.”33 Fuchs, et al., offer a similar criticism. “The argument is simple: in communities where social capital has become scarce, political participation is invariably low. The practical implications of this argument are clear: increase social capital in poor African American and immigrant city neighborhoods and political participation will increase as well.”34 And further, “the conventional social capital thesis falls short as a fully satisfying explanation of


the decline of political participation, applied especially to urban democracy. It falls short because it is premised on an inadequate conceptualization of the urban tradition of political participation, which is rooted more in conflict than in consensus building.”35 A presumption of apathy within such groups and their neighborhoods is not new, according to sociologist Daniel J. Monti, Jr.,36 but can be explained in part by national and international surveys that focus on traditional measures of civic participation, including membership in organizations or associations, or electoral activities, or political attentiveness.37 Macro-level surveys, however, can have limited application in local situations where racial-, class-, or gender-dynamics represent major barriers to political participation. As noted by Foley, et al., aggregate statistics on the national level can obscure local realities and incorrectly emphasize the importance of “associational density.”38 The degree of “associational density,” a major reflection of social capital, can be irrelevant to political and economic barriers that stand in the way of full political and civic participation for many people. These barriers include unequal distribution of information about how to participate in the electoral arena, job restraints, gerrymandering, and intimidation. Furthermore, the important issues for the livelihood of working-class groups are sometimes disconnected from electoral processes. Public participation and civic engagement in the pursuit of individual or group agendas in working-class communities do not necessarily get played out in institutional venues. This means that solely utilizing traditional political or electoral variables to measure civic participation can make invisible the participation of poor and working-class people. Rhonda Y. Williams makes an important distinction between consumption issues and political issues: Exploring activism at the point of consumption—that is, around housing, food, clothing, and daily life in community spaces—reveals the existence of these unacknowledged daily struggles and protests. Black community—if not electoral—struggles were increasingly being found in neighborhoods around consumption as well as political issues. In addition to struggles for voting rights, school desegregation, and the opportunity to eat, sleep, swim, and play tennis wherever one liked, activists in northern and southern cities began to tackle a range of issues equally central to the achievement of full citizenship: the right to adequate housing, income, medical care, food, and clothing.39

Robin Kelley uncovered a similar social dynamic in his case study of racial interactions on segregated buses in Birmingham, Alabama in the


pre-World War II period. He concluded that protest on the part of Black bus customers revolved around issues of respect and the relationship between transportation and employment, not de-segregation, per se.40 The lesson in this literature is that examination of civic participation or social capital is incomplete if it only focuses on how people in lowincome communities become involved with overtly electoral or organizational issues.41 Social Capital and Irony of Public Policy Social capital is touted as a key ingredient in neighborhood revitalization of impoverished areas because it encourages people to become engaged in the civic life of the community.Yet, and ironically, there are several urban policy initiatives that serve to undermine civic participation in poor and low-income neighborhoods. One public policy that discourages civic participation and weakens community-based organizations in inner-city neighborhoods is the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996.42 Welfare reform has actually undermined civic participation in Black and Latino urban communities that have high concentrations of families on public assistance. This effect occurs by separating clients from the possibility of civic participation as a way to enact social change, and ignoring the role of community-based or intermediary organizations in the mobilization of civic capacity. Welfare reform is “anti-social capital” by virtue of its imposing mandates on community-based organizations involving monitoring of welfare recipients, discouraging attention from employment and training strategies that have proved effective in the past, encouraging a view of public assistance recipients as dependent pariahs in communities, and ignoring possibilities to leverage neighborhood assets and resources— found in many inner-city communities—as a way to generate economic mobility for poor and working-class families.43 Welfare reform does not emphasize civic participation and cooperative engagement in lowincome neighborhoods but rather endorses and mandates a big brother, work-first frenzy philosophy that results in women and children remaining in poverty. This approach does nothing to strengthen the social fabric of neighborhoods. In some communities the implementation of welfare reform is pursued in ways that actively prevent women from bonding and pursuing collaborative actions for group advancement. The findings of a survey of one hundred Latina women in Lawrence, Massachusetts during 1999 and 2000 show that the state government responsible for implementing


welfare reform had no interest in helping women to become involved and connected to their communities. The Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance has reflected a complete disregard for tapping the potential civic capacity of the Latinas studied, yet the women in this group showed themselves to be hard-working, committed to the well-being of their children, and quite knowledgeable of neighborhood issues.44 Gentrification strategies and attempts to de-concentrate poor people are also based on a presumption that inner-city neighborhoods lack social capital. Again, such policies actually destroy what people might describe as social capital, or social fabric, in local places. Based on an extensive survey of residents in Minneapolis neighborhoods, Edward Goetz shows how policies and practices to de-concentrate poverty resulted in a significant loss of social capital. He used a survey to ask respondents to agree or disagree with the following statement: “My child . . . plays with others in neighborhood.” An overwhelming 76% of residents in the pre-move period agreed with this statement compared with only 49% of the displaced residents. To another question—“In your neighborhood in the past six months, how often did you . . . talk with your neighbors?”—71% of residents responded affirmatively during the pre-move period but this dropped to 52% of those who had moved. To a related question—“In this neighborhood, have your children been . . . involved in community activities?”—44% of the residents responded “yes” in the pre-move period but this rate dropped to 33% in the postmove period.45 Goetz illustrates an inconsistency between the call for social capital in low-income communities and public policy. Regarding the city of Minneapolis he found that: Southeast Asian families living in north side public housing were more likely than African-American families to like it and to value the community resources and support networks that had been created in the area. Deconcentration opponents among these families argued that dispersal would destroy the networks upon which they, as recent immigrants, depended. These networks existed on two dimensions. First were the formal assistance organizations and service agencies on the north side, including the Hmong American Mutual Assistance Association, the Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota, and the Southeast Asian Community Council. In addition, the north side site was home to an array of social services established over time to assist public housing residents, including a food shelf, adult education, and language services.46


Thus, we have a contradiction between endorsement of social capital as a way of increasing civic participation in low-income neighborhoods, and public policies that have the effects of weakening the organizational potential for local civic capacity. Emphasis on social capital as a way to resolve spatial and racial inequality also exposes the hypocrisy of government. There are instances when citizens have banded together to appeal for government support on behalf of a range of neighborhood issues, only to see government turn its back. Such a case involves the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh highlights the struggles of residents in this massive public housing complex.47 Although many of the units at this Chicago site were physically dilapidated, there were continual collective struggles on the part of residents to improve living conditions. But in the case of residents living in public housing, government, civic leadership, and the private sector turned their backs on these efforts. Residents had to fend for themselves in attempts to improve living conditions in their own housing and communities. The author shows that there was no lack of social capital among residents in this situation; the key problem was that the government and private sector ignored—indeed, were threatened by—the daily struggles of poor and low-income residents. This story is repeated in the case of the Cabrini-Green neighborhood in the same city. Larry Bennett and Adolph Reed, Jr., observe that city government was aggressive in portraying a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood as lacking in family and friendship networks or neighborhood associations. It was described as a place bereft of a responsible and effective leaders and where people were socially isolated.48 Here too, and based on interviews with residents and direct involvement in neighborhood issues, the authors find a “counter-portrait,” rich in social capital and individual and collective struggles to better one’s community.49 There are two presumptions associated with the utilization of social capital and its claim as a wonder drug. One is that inner cities have relatively limited social and economic resources. The second is that a middle-class sector has abandoned these communities. A number of studies illustrate, however, that while inner cities may have experienced an increase in class stratification, this does not necessarily mean that upwardly-mobile sectors are exiting in large numbers.50 Certainly, many households that realize upward economic mobility leave inner-city communities. However, this movement does not negate the fact that many others decide to stay in these very same communities. Review of actual neighborhood case studies, furthermore, shows that Black and


Latino communities can be impoverished and yet contain impressive economic resources. The neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston, for instance, shows a relatively stable community where large numbers of Black middle-class households have remained in the community. About 68% of the approximately forty-seven thousand residents in this area are African American and 23% are Latino. This neighborhood is among the poorest in the city of Boston: in the 2000 federal census, 29% of all households within Roxbury’s boundaries were reported as impoverished. In spite of its poverty, the Black middle class is not fleeing this neighborhood. Households reporting incomes between $35,000 and $75,000 in 2000 comprised 27% of all households in the census tracts contained within this neighborhood. Several hundred households (5%) reported incomes in excess of $100,000. As a matter of fact, the number of Black households reporting incomes greater than $50,000 in Boston’s Black neighborhoods, including Roxbury, has increased significantly as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Growth of Black Households Earning More than $50,000 per Year, 1990–2000

Neighborhoods like Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, where most Blacks in the city of Boston live, did not experience decline in the presence of middle-class households. In “poor” Roxbury, residents own a wide range of financial assets including certificates of deposits, stocks and bonds, mutual funds, retirement accounts, and life insurance policies with cash values. In


2001, residents held $65.7 million in certificates of deposit, $58.2 million in bonds and savings bonds, $76.3 million in stocks, $126 million in mutual funds, and $430.8 million in retirement accounts. The value of home equity in this impoverished area of the city was $2.2 billion in 2001. Impoverished neighborhoods that have significant economic resources and assets indirectly serve as a critique of social capital as the key variable for increasing a community’s level of economic prosperity and social stability. The case of Roxbury is not unique. In predominantly Latino neighborhoods of Lawrence, one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, we find a similar situation where the stock of social capital becomes irrelevant in the face of enormous economic resources. The poorest census tract in Lawrence (Tract 2501) reports a poverty rate of 48.2% in 2000. (The U.S. Census Bureau considers this an area of “extreme poverty” since the rate is higher than 40%). Without considering other facts or knowing what is occurring on the ground level in terms of civic engagement on the part of residents, we can well imagine what images such an area conjures in the minds of scholars, including for the social capital proponents, a lack of trust, networks, and cooperation among the residents. Yet, in this very same census tract one finds 974 households holding some form of financial assets. Approximately 14% of these households owned certificates of deposit in 2001, 21% held savings bonds, 16% owned stocks, 30% owned life insurance policies with cash values, and 12% owned mutual funds. The aggregate values of these financial assets were relatively considerable given the overall poverty rate in the census tract. The aggregate value of certificates of deposit totaled $5.2 million, savings bonds totaled $735,000, stocks totaled $5.5 million, and mutual funds held by the residents in the city’s poorest area were assessed at $8.9 million. The residents held $27.6 million in retirement accounts and the value of home equity reached $146 million in 2001. By the way, residents in this one census tract spent $28.3 million in 2002 on retail and non-retail expenditures.51 As is the case with Roxbury, where approximately 1,100 businesses are located, the Arlington neighborhood in Lawrence, one of the poorest in this city and with a high population of Latinos, boasts many small and local businesses as shown in Figure 2. While poverty is a critical problem in this neighborhood, one also finds approximately six hundred microenterprises that employed about 1,435 persons in 2003 and generated $162 million in sales.52 Based on a survey of Latino entrepreneurs by Santiago and Jennings, what is most important to the survival of many Latino businesses in this city is access


Figure 2 Microenterprises in Lawrence’s Arlington Neighborhood

to capital and a friendlier local government that sees this sector as an asset for the city’s future. The well-being of these businesses seems less dependent upon the notion of social capital, or level of trust or networks among business owners, and more dependent on local government policies and practices towards this sector.53 This information supports the findings of others who report a high level of social capital in places presumed to be low in social capital due to the presence of urban and economic distress. Portney and Berry observe, for example: Poor black neighborhoods are often stereotyped as communities where social and political institutions have badly deteriorated and where antisocial behavior is all too prevalent . . . In the cities we studied, poor black neighborhoods and black neighborhoods at all economic levels demonstrate a relatively high degree of political participation in neighborhood associations. These neighborhood associations are effective in cultivating among African Americans attitudes that are supportive of the community. In neighborhoods with significant numbers of black residents, strong democratic structures work.54


The many examples of inner-city neighborhoods that show an abundant level of social capital and civic energy, albeit in the midst of spatial inequality, motivate Fuchs, et al. ask: “Has social capital really declined in poor and immigrant communities, or have researchers simply been looking for the wrong kind of activities?”55 Regardless of a vibrant middle-class sector, significant community-level spending power, and enormous range of resources that have potential economic value, living conditions in places like Roxbury and parts of Lawrence are not as good as those found in other neighborhoods. The director of the Dominican Studies Institute in New York City, Ramona Hernandez, notes that the Dominican community has been described as one rich in social capital. The evidence for this claim is the community’s “thriving entrepreneurial economy.” But this has been ineffective in resolving the “other face of the community” composed of significant poverty, marginalization, and economic depression.56 The foregoing examples suggest that the key question facing these neighborhoods is not how to create, attract, or sustain social capital, but rather how to leverage the neighborhood’s assets and resources on behalf of residents and the neighborhood’s well-being. A focus on social capital does not answer this question. Again, as asserted by Portes and Landolt (1996): [T]he call for higher social capital as a solution to the problems of the inner city misdiagnoses the problem and can lead to both a waste of resources and new frustrations. It is not the lack of social capital, but the lack of objective economic resources—beginning with decent jobs—that underlies the plight of impoverished urban groups . . . Undoubtedly, individuals and communities can benefit greatly from social participation and mutual trust, but the outcomes will vary depending on what resources are obtained, who is excluded from them, and what is demanded in exchange.”57

This describes the idea of civic capacity as more important than social capital in explaining local successes aimed at improving living conditions.58 Social Capital as Neighborhood Revitalization Claiming that social capital is a key issue in the revitalization of inner cities is not just a “misdiagnosis” of a problem. The call for social capital is associated with urban redevelopment strategies that primarily benefit corporate and wealthy interests. In other words, declaring that the lack of social capital in certain places explains current living conditions carries


certain policy and political implications for these places. Exclaiming the need to create social capital as a response to the effects of racial and spatial inequalities facilitates what Judd and Swanstrom describe as a progrowth logic of economic development for the urban United States—a framework that seeks to transform inner cities and pursue neighborhood revitalization in ways that meet the needs of wealthy institutions and corporate interests.59 Generally, the logic infused with the call for importing social capital, proceeds in the following order: 1. Poverty and crime are major problems in the inner cities. 2. There is no middle class, or wealth, or assets—and, by implication— no, or little, social capital in these places. 3. Social capital is a key feature for addressing poverty, crime, and joblessness. 4. The suburban and corporate-based middle class have the skills, civic capacity, and concern to improve their communities. 5. The way to revitalize inner cities, therefore—logically—is to encourage the middle-class to settle in these places, or allow big business and big institutions to utilize land to meet its own interest. 6. Before this can take place, however, it is necessary to de-concentrate, or contain, or de-mobilize poor and working-class people. This framework has political and policy faces in many places in urban society as suggested in the example discussed by Fraser, et al.: Central to the efforts of Chattanooga leaders to reimagine the city as a space of hope and prosperity has been their ability to shift the scale at which they operate by reclaiming devalorized areas, “reincorporating” them into the city, and building a landscape that is appealing to certain sensibilities. These sensibilities essentially are those associated with middle- and upper-middle-class consumption and the related process of capital investment (e.g., convention center facilities, shopping districts, university expansion) . . . spatial strategies to reclaim inner-city neighborhoods, arguably transforming these areas from predominantly spaces of use by inner-city residents into a site for capital accumulation.60

The claim that urban spaces dominated by low-income groups and people of color lack in social capital, opens the door to calls for restoring tradition, or order, in these urban spaces. Urban scholar Stephen Nathan Haymes argues that even the selection of architecture is utilized as a tool for such strategies. He claims that “neoclassical architecture is used as a


way to ‘restore tradition’ in the city. In this sense, architectural redevelopment or gentrification is tied to a nostalgia for the past.” Haymes explains that values associated with neoclassical architecture “such as order, purity, beauty, and rationality” are seen as replacing lack of order in inner cities.61 But what is also being replaced is the political potential of residents in low-income neighborhoods to challenge urban regimes dominated by corporate interests. Anthropologist Arlene Davila suggests that it is social order, rather than social capital, that is the aim of corporate interests in el Barrio, a primarily Puerto Rican and Latino historic neighborhood in New York City. The city utilized the neighborhood’s empowerment zone designation to attract White visitors and land investors. It initiated this possibility by commissioning a “Tourism Market Study” that at first declared the neighborhood as unsafe and decaying.62 Yet, for long-time residents, the neighborhood is culturally vibrant and rich in social capital, and with a long tradition of collective struggle to improve living conditions. But to transform this Latino neighborhood for the benefit of a predominantly White and professional middle-class seeking lower housing costs and easier access to downtown, the city first had to declare el Barrio to be a “slum,” devoid of worth, and certainly lacking in social capital among its residents. Conclusion Ultimately, corporate and wealthy interests are the beneficiaries of social capital as substitute for political and community-based responses to racial and spatial inequality. The proposal that social capital is a resource to increase civic engagement and “turn neighborhoods around” opens the political door for these same kinds of interests to acquire ownership and management of land in inner cities. The discourse of social capital— including the suggestion that it is lacking in inner cities—becomes justification for the continual de-funding of community-based organizations and local nonprofits, sectors that play important roles in building political participation and civic engagement. As Jane Franklin states in a review of select literature on social capital: “The idea of social capital aids the shift in responsibility for ‘social inclusion’ from economy to society, and from government to individual, informing policies that focus on social behavior, reducing the cost to government, since . . . it provides non-economic solutions to social problems.”63 And thus she quips, “Putnam’s ideas appeal to policy makers.”64 Social capital as a proposal for improving living conditions in inner cities is seductive and enjoys support because the status quo of wealth


and power, and lack of access to such, is not challenged. As the history and development of neighborhood struggles aimed at reducing or eliminating racial and spatial inequality continues to unfold, however, it becomes clearer that the lack of social capital and civic engagement on the part of residents is not the problem. For interests with power and wealth, and political agendas that benefit corporate elites, the real problem is that these places, lacking in material goods and suffering the effects of racial and spatial inequality, have to be controlled and rendered politically weak in the interests of corporate and global power. Notes 1. This paper is based on a presentation to the 2004–2006 Science Research Fund Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in Kobe, Japan (October 9, 2004), and to the National Conference of Black Political Scientists on March 22, 2005. I extend special thanks to my friend and colleague, Junichi Kawata, Professor of Law at Osaka University, for many discussions on this topic. Ericka Stallings (2005) and Jen Lawrence (2006), graduate students at Tufts University, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, assisted with many research tasks. My thanks to Assistant Professor Lisa García Bedolla at the University of California, Irvine and Assistant Professor Michael Leo Owens at Emory University for reviewing and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. 2. H. Coffee and B. Geys, “Institutional Performance and Social Capital: An Application to the Local Government Level,” Journal of Urban Affairs 27, no. 5 (2005) 485–501. 3. D. L. Turcotte and Linda Silka, Reflections on the Concept of Social Capital: Complex Relationships in Refugee and Immigrant Communities (Lowell, Mass.: University of Lowell, 2003), 3. 4. R. D. Putnam, Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 415. 5. A. Vidal, “Building Social Capital to Promote Community Equity,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 70 (2) (2004), 165. 6. Ibid. 7. I. Light, “Symposium: Using Social Capital to Help Integrate Planning Theory, Research, and Practice,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 70 (2) (Spring 2004), 4. 8. A. Portes and P. Landolt, “Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II; The Downside of Social Capital,” The American Prospect (online) 7 (26) (May/June 1996), para. 1. 9. M. Woolcock and D. Narayan, “SocialCapital: Implications for Development Theory, Research, & Policy,” The World Bank Research Observer 15 (2) (2000), 225–49.


10. R. Putnam and K. Goss. Introduction in R. Putnam, Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11. C. Sirianni and L. Friedland, (n.d) “Social Capital,” Civic Dictionary Civic Practices Network, http://www.cpn.org/tools/dictionary/capital.html (Retrieved August 16, 2004), para. 3. 12. L. Larsen, et al., “Bonding and Bridging: Understanding the Relationship Between Social Capital and Civic Action,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 24 (1) (Fall 2004), 64–77. 13. Ibid. 14. I. Light, “Symposium: Using Social Capital to Help Integrate Planning Theory, Research, and Practice,” Journal of the American Planning Association 70 (2) (Spring 2003), 147. 15. Ibid., 149. 16. M. Chupp, Investing in People through Place: The Role of Social Capital in Transforming Neighborhoods; A Literature Review of Social Capital and Neighborhood Transformation (Cleveland: Cleveland State University, Levine College of Urban Affairs, 1999), 2. 17. Ibid. 18. Y. M. Alex-Assensoh, Neighborhood, Family, and Political Behavior in Urban America (Garland Press: New York, 1998); S. Baron, J. Field, and T. Schuller, Social Capital: Critical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 19. James DeFilippis, “The Myth of Social Capital in Community Development” Housing Policy Debate, Volume 12, Issue 4 (2001), p 781 20. R. M. Silverman, “CDCS and Charitable Organizations in the Urban South: Mobilizing Social Capital Based on Race and Religion for Neighborhood Revitalization,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30 (2) (April 2001), 241. 21. A. Greely, “Coleman Revisited: Religious Structures as a Source of Social Capital,” in Foley, et al. (2003), 235. 22. S. N. Durlauf and M. Fafchamps, “Social Capital,” JEL Classification: E26,010,040,L14,Z13 (July 13, 2004), 2. 23. R. M. Silverman, “CDCS and Charitable Organizations in the Urban South: Mobilizing Social Capital Based on Race and Religion for Neighborhood Revitalization,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30 (2) (April 2001), 263. 24. “Inner-city Ills,” Civic Dictionary, (2004), 1 25. Omar Roberts (2003) 26. Rodney Hero (2003: 113) 27. Ibid., p 116. 28. García Bedolla & Scola, 6. 29. H. Cruse, Plural but Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and the America’s Plural Society (New York: William Morrow, 1987). 30. I. Katznelson, Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900–30 and Britain, 1948–68 (London: Oxford University, 1973); G. Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto; Negro New York,


31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); K. L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1976) M. Chavez and L. R. Fraga, “Social Trust, Civic Engagement, and Social Mobility,” paper presented at the Western Political Science Association Meeting (Denver, Colorado, 2003). R. A. Couto and C. S. Guthrie, Making Democracy Work Better: Mediating Structures, Social Capital, and the Democratic Prospect (North Carolina: The North Carolina Press, 1999). K. E. Portney and J. M. Berry, “Mobilizing Minority Communities: Social Capital and Participation in Urban Neighborhoods,” in Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective, B. Edwards, M. W. Foley, and M. Diani (eds.) (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 71. E. R. Fuchs, R. Y. Shapiro, and L. C. Minnite, “Social Capital, Political Participation, and the Urban Community,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, Saegert, et al. (eds.) (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 292. Ibid., 294. D. J. Monti, Jr., “Old Whines in New Bottles: Robert Putnam, Richard Florida, and the ‘Community’ Problem in Contemporary America,” paper based on presentation to the American Sociological Association, San Francisco (2004). P. A. Hall, “Great Britain: The Role of Government and the Distribution of Social Capital,” in Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society, R. D. Putnam (ed.), (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21–57. M. Foley, B. Edwards, and M. Diani, “Social Capital Reconsidered,” in Beyond Tocqueville, Bob Edwards, Michael W. Foley, and Mario Diani., (eds.) (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 271. R. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14. R. D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994). There is literature that looks at a similar dynamic in the international arena. Impoverished groups are approached as having agency in civic life, though not as part of mainstream structures or processes. See, for example, Ananya Roy’s discussion about “urban informality” and the need for planners to understand this development in “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 71 (2) (Spring 2005) 147–58. Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104–193, § 1, 110 Stat. 2105. J. Jennings, Welfare Reform and the Revitalization of Inner-City Neighborhoods (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2003).


44. J. Santiago and J. Jennings, ‘Welfare Reform and ‘Welfare to Work’ as NonSequitur:Case Study of Experiences of Latina Women in Massachusetts’, Journal of Poverty, 81 (1) (2004) 25. 45. E. G. Goetz, Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America (Washington D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2003). 46. Ibid., 148. 47. S. A. Venkatesh, American Project: the Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2000). 48. L. Bennett and A. Reed Jr., “The New face of Urban Renewal: The Near North Redevelopment Initiative and the Cabrini-Green neighborhood,” in Without Justice for All, A. Reed, Jr. (ed.) (Westview Press: Boulder, Colorado, 1999), 182. 49. Ibid., 181. 50. See references for Gregory (1992), Moore (2005), and Owens (1997) in the Bibliography. 51. The census figures reported are based on the 2000 Census, SF3 (Standard); information and data about financial assets and consumer expenditures are based on geo-coded data provided by Applied Geographic Solutions, Household Finances (2001) and Consumer Expenditures (2002). 52. A microenterprise is defined here as a business employing five or fewer employees. The data are based on information provided by Claritas BusinessFacts® (2003) and then spatially plotted by using the addresses of these businesses in a street map of the city of Lawrence in Massachusetts. 53. J. Santiago and J. Jennings, La Comunidad de Negocios Latinos de Lawrence, Massachusetts: Un Perfil y Analisis (2000 y 2003), paper prepared for the Community Economic and Enterprise Center, Northern Essex Community College, 2004. 54. K. E. Portney and J. M. Berry, “Mobilizing Minority Communities: Social Capital and Participation in Urban Neighborhoods,” in Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective, B. Edwards, M. W. Foley, and M. Diani (eds.) (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 82. 55. E. R. Fuchs, R. Y. Shapiro, and L. C. Minnite, “Social Capital, Political Participation, and the Urban Community,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, Saegert, et al. (eds.) (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 292. 56. R. Hernandez, The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 57. A. Portes and P. Landolt, “Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II; The Downside of Social Capital,” The American Prospect (online) 7 (26) (May/June 1996), para. 22. 58. M. Orr, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986–1998 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000).


59. D. R. Judd and T. Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). 60. J. C. Fraser, E. L. Kick, and J. P. Williams, “The Construction of the Local and the Limits of Contemporary Community Building in the United States,” Urban Affairs Review 38 (3) (January 2003), 428. 61. S. Haymes, Race, Culture, and the City (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 117. 62. A. Davila, “Empowered Culture? New York City’s Empowerment Zone and the Selling of el Barrio,” The Annals 594 (July 2004), 54. 63. J. Franklin, “Social Capital: Policy and Politics,” Social Policy and Society 2 (4) (2003), 349. 64. Ibid., 350.

Chapter 6

Social Capital in Refugee and Immigrant Communities David Turcotte and Linda Silka

paradox pervades discussions about the impact of immigrants and refugees on communities. The paradox is this: on the one hand, commentators who report on struggling communities highlight the daunting obstacles faced by these cities because of an influx of immigrants and refugees who bring with them a host of needs. On the other hand, commentators point to the importance that immigrants and refugees play in bringing vibrancy to otherwise stagnant economies. These are not idle differences. They reflect whether community residents see immigrants and refugees as urgently in need of a social service approach or, instead, as bringing resources likely to improve a city’s prospects. These differences in perspective also tap into many current debates, such as those about what constitutes social capital and how as a society we can best build and maintain the civil structures that create social capital. At their least refined, these debates reflect differences in whether refugees and immigrants are seen as a problem or a promise. In addition, yet another paradox is emerging in discussions about immigrant and refugee communities within the United States. Traditional analysis of immigrants emphasized questions about why migrants leave their native countries and how they integrate into their new host country. However, more recent research is now analyzing a

A


new phenomenon of the ongoing transnational relationships between immigrant/refugee communities and their country of origin. The existence of this new phenomenon has generated debate and controversy within the study of immigration. Too often the above positions have been argued in the abstract. Our experiences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Family, Work, and Community (CFWC) show the need to become immersed in actual activities aimed at community building and economic development if one is going to address these issues in a nuanced way. Over the last few years at CFWC we have engaged in many community development and social capital ventures with newcomers to eastern Massachusetts from Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. These initiatives include leadership training, development of new business opportunities linked to environmental activities, development of communication tools, and support for the development of business networks and mutual assistance associations. All of these initiatives reflect in depth partnerships with refugee and immigrant leaders. These initiatives have helped us explore three questions: (1) What innovative infrastructure developments in the newcomer community have taken place in the Massachusetts Merrimack Valley? (2) What strengths of newcomer communities typically go unrecognized by traditional approaches to community economic development? (3) What clashes in models of community economic development emerge between immigrants and planners engaging in traditional practices? In this chapter we point to the need to focus on the actual practices of community economic development and social capital development that immigrant and refugee groups regularly use in building a presence in the region. Without a full understanding of these practices, efforts by university partners and others are likely to be unsuccessful because they will not be attuned to the complex perspectives on community development that drive efforts in newcomer groups to enhance the community. To set the stage for our discussions of the local scene, in the next section we consider social capital analyses that are increasingly being adopted by analysts as the lens through which to see what is “missing” in poor communities and to explain how communities might use social capital to strengthen their economic base. This body of work provides an important framework from which to think about the communities that are home to growing numbers of immigrants, in part because such analyses not only bring to the forefront questions about the approaches that immigrants bring to their communities but also because this analysis for understanding newcomers remains contested.

SOCIAL CAPITAL IN REFUGEE AND IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES 111

Social Capital and Community Economic Development Increasingly, the notion of strengthening a community’s economic base is being framed in terms of the language of social capital. Community development efforts are adopting the framework of social capital as a way to understand what communities must do if they are to prosper.1 Although disagreements remain about how best to define social capital, it is generally described as civic engagement and as formal and informal civic structures such as schools, neighborhood associations, and churches. The availability of these structures is seen as enhancing a community’s ability to compete for jobs and residents.2 The links to business and economic development are seen as straightforward. As one writer notes: Small, locally owned establishments reinforce civic engagement because the owners are heavily invested in the community. Owners and managers of small production firms participate in local community institutions in order to maintain networks of local business contacts and supporters. Community involvement means that these small businesses may be less likely to pull out of the community in an economic downturn, and more likely to support and lead local nonprofit institutions.3

The construct of social capital is rapidly becoming a core theme within community development discussions. Okagaki focuses on community development as an anti-poverty strategy that in turn is seen as comprehensive opportunity-oriented approach that includes economic development, labor force development, and social capital [italics added]. Okagaki argues that “true economic opportunity depends on both an internal process of individual development and the external support provided by social capital [italics added].4 Flora and Flora emphasize openness, ease of entry, optimal utilization of available resources, and strong networking as key to community development. Strong networking is often touted as an important component of social capital.5 In bringing social capital into discussions, some development specialists focus on whether a particular community can be said to have a great deal of social capital, whereas other analysts concern themselves with the question of whether social capital can be increased through appropriate interventions. Gardner, for example, charted the progress of a region that attempted to revitalize itself by investing in social capital and “taking active steps to reestablish a healthy and growing civic society.” At the start of the community-driven intervention, the area suffered from high social instability and low job creation. Rather than


tackling these problems directly, the community chose to emphasize strategies aimed at increasing social capital. Community leaders noted: “We needed to develop social capital, putting a new emphasis on the ‘we’ relative to the spirit of community. If we were to be competitive, we needed to concern and involve as many citizens as possible in the solution of common problems.”6 With regard to the creation of social capital, Kingley, McNeely, and Gibson contrast community building that is focused on social capital formation with the old-style neighborhood-based poverty alleviation programs that over the past half-century have dominated communities. The primary aim of building social capital is not to simply give “more money, services, or other material benefits to the poor.” Rather, “the central theme is to obliterate feelings of dependency and to replace them with attitudes of self-reliance, self-confidence, and responsibility . . . [T]hese are not ideas being imposed from the outside—they are what the leaders of distressed neighborhoods across the nation themselves are saying that they want to see accomplished.”7 Despite the increasingly widespread use of concepts of social capital, these remain contested constructs. In his chapter of this book, Jennings notes that the assumption that social capital is what is missing in poor neighborhoods is problematic because it ignores structural inequality in these communities. This perspective, Jennings contends, “dismisses institutional and policy causes of structural inequity.”8 He points to Silverman’s argument that an emphasis on social capital as a way to alleviate structural inequity is also problematic because social capital remains difficult to measure, with varying definitions of social capital used by researchers, and because social capital is a value defined by local context and thus cannot be generically moved from one place to the next.9 Jennings points to other problems with the concept of social capital. He cites work that illustrates what he refers to as “de-racialization of social capital” when researchers overlook racial and ethnic differences when viewing social capital. Finally, Jennings notes how the language of social capital has been adopted by privileged groups as a way to preserve their position and that these groups have often resisted self-help initiatives in Black communities. He also notes this perspective is problematic as it simply assumes inner-city low-income and minority communities have higher levels of apathy and less civic engagement. Other forms of civic participation in these communities are overlooked. In the Monti chapter, the author points to the deep inconsistencies in the social capital analyses by Putnam10 and Florida,11 the two


most commonly cited advocates for social capital analyses.12 Monti argues that Florida and Putnam offer evidence that contradict each other. On one hand, Putnam laments that cities have less social capital than smaller towns, as they are too big and diverse, yet Florida claims that cities with more diversity and creativity are preferable to smaller monolithic communities. Consequently, Florida sees cities are superior while Putnam believes small towns are preferable. “Putnam’s story is actually the flip side of Florida’s. It’s all about decay and loss and the rejection of time-honored customs, codes, and beliefs.”13 The extent to which a social capital analysis has value in explaining community economic development in immigrant and refugee communities remains a point of contention. Many see problems in applying these concepts to diverse immigrant neighborhoods. For example, Chang points to the ways in which a focus on dominant Anglo-European norms can “smother the norms and practices of minority groups and with them the development of social capital within that group.” The concepts of social capital also fail to capture the nature of the struggles in these communities. For example, the difficulties of language loss has been pointed to by Chang, wherein elders have difficulty offering support and norm development if they speak a language that children in the family do not speak and are not learning.14 Social capital analyses does little to assist in understanding how these challenges are overcome within the many successful immigrant communities. Laws focuses on immigrants who have relocated as a result of changes associated with globalization. “At the heart of this linkage is an economic restructuring across societies and in the U.S. that has potent social consequences for immigrant populations. Such people, induced to migrate by changing economic circumstances, find growing ghettoization, isolation, and cultural antipathies in their new settings. In this new globality, immigrant populations are commonly fingered as the other, the invading and ominous people threatening time-tested social norms and economic principles.”15 Yet the strengths of newcomer communities—strengths that bear resemblance to operational definitions of social capital—often go unrecognized by local business and economic development professionals. The strong family and social bonds that make possible the generation of financial capital within ethnic communities are often unacknowledged. For example, as Portes and Zhou have noted, immigrants often pool their savings into an informal “rotating credit association” that is used to finance entrepreneurial members of newcomer communities.16 In a study of 149 Latino businesses in Lawrence Massachusetts, Santiago and


Jennings found high rates of startup funding from family or close friends.17 According to Portes and Zhou, immigrants report feeling more comfortable with informal verbal agreements than with the labor intensive process often required to obtain a bank loan. The authors contend that the former informal approach functions well, even in the absence of a legally enforceable agreement, because members of these newcomer communities risk ostracism if they fail to follow through on their verbal commitments. In addition to the fear of expulsion from one’s community, immigrants place a high value in honoring commitments to their close family and social networks.18 The strength that this “social compact” brings to a local economy has often gone unnoticed by the larger society. These brief examples point to the need for more to be known about infrastructure development in immigrant communities—often highly impoverished communities—and the ways in which these developments emerge. Although these developments would seem to fit the definition of social capital, they also appear to involve something “more,” something not fully captured by standard social capital analyses. In the next section we describe some of the infrastructure developments that have emerged in the Merrimack Valley’s large Asian community that raise intriguing questions about how local communities build a viable economic base by creating deep social networks and community links. Innovative Infrastructure Developments in Merrimack Valley’s Newcomer Community A number of infrastructure developments have emerged within the immigrant community in Lowell and the Merrimack Valley over the last decade. Organizations and associations have proliferated, including the Asian American Business Association, the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association (CMAA), the Cambodian American League of Lowell, the Cambodian Women’s Organization, and the Lao Family Mutual Association. Programs such as UML’s CIRCLE (Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment) Program have also emerged. These organizations, associations, and projects provide some social services but primarily their aim is to serve as engines of economic growth within immigrant communities. CMAA, for example, has worked to become a microincubator for startup immigrant businesses, and, through its acquisition of a former mill, has attempted to become a site for growth and revitalization in a depressed neighborhood of Lowell that is home to a large number of Cambodian families.


Other “engines” of immigrant economic development have also emerged and the diversity of these efforts speaks to the diverse skills and resources immigrants bring to the region. The Acre Family Daycare has developed programs for training immigrant women to start their own family day care centers. The New Farmers, New Beginnings program, funded by the Farm Services Administration and jointly sponsored by Community Teamwork, Inc. and Tufts University, assists American farmers in leasing land to and mentoring Cambodians who previously were farmers in their home country, thus enabling them to employ their traditional farming skills in America. A goal of this initiative is to develop viable businesses where Asian crops can be raised for immigrant families who are unable to purchase their preferred foods in the United States or can do so only at great expense associated with imported foods. Linked with this work are attempts to start an Asian Farmers’ Market in Lowell designed to draw in Cambodian and other Southeast Asian families as consumers. Others have focused on urban aquaculture and the possibilities of developing a viable industry that would integrate the traditional skills people bring from Cambodia with new environmental technologies. To explore this possibility, the CMAA and UML received funding from the Department of Food and Agriculture to develop a business plan and demonstration program. As yet another example of bringing together recent environmental innovations with traditional practices, UML’s CFWC and the Center for Sustainable Production worked with local immigrant restaurants to investigate nutrient cycling and the possibility of linking local businesses to the farmers through composting. Another innovative way that immigrant communities have promoted economic development is through cultural celebrations. In the case of each festival, the underlying themes of small business and economic development animate these events. The annual Southeast Asian Water Festival (now in its tenth year) draws thousands to Lowell, and directly and indirectly promotes economic development in the immigrant community. The festival, Celebrating Diverse Traditions, further exemplifies this approach, bringing together immigrant leaders with officials from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs to address, in part, issues of economic development. The focus of Celebrating Diverse Traditions was placed on identifying best economic development practices from the home countries of Lowell’s newcomers, with the goal that these could then be used to transform Lowell into an economically vibrant but environmentally safe city. Many ideas emerged in the focus groups leading up to the festival, including one by a Cambodian community leader, Sophyroth Sun, in which he presented a plan for an Asian


cultural center that would be housed in a building designed to integrate East and West and that would draw together professional businesses, start up business, and cultural and museum space to capture the integration of Cambodian and American approaches to transforming Lowell. By no means has the creation of traditional businesses been neglected in these efforts. A university-funded study of minority businesses in Lowell documented the emergence of many new immigrant businesses. The impact of this development on small immigrant businesses is apparent throughout the Merrimack Valley. If one looks at the downtown and neighborhoods of Lowell, one can see the numbers of newcomer businesses now in operation. In many respects, Lowell’s storefronts would be ghost towns were it not for immigrant entrepreneurs. Other examples of economic development in immigrant and refugees communities emphasize alternative ways that area immigrants access capital. Money sharing and the development of informal loan funds, particularly within the Southeast Asian community in Lowell, have propelled small business development. In addition, this small business development within the Merrimack Valley has forged strong commercial links with suppliers from native countries. As a result, potential export links with native countries provide additional economic development opportunities. These businesses benefit from the many social links that exist throughout the newcomer community. One of the reflections of these social links is the high multiplier effect in immigrant communities such as Lowell.19 Studies indicate that within newcomer communities, the multiplier impact is typically greater—and sometimes much greater— than in the nonimmigrant community. In a study in Miami, for example, it was estimated that in the Cuban refugee community the income generated by the multiplier effect was 4.5 times higher than in the nonimmigrant community.20 Why might this be the case? Immigrant communities tend to buy products and services within their social networks in part as a result of language and cultural familiarity. There is also recognition within the community of the importance of supporting newcomer businesses. This “bounded solidarity,” as it has been termed, increases the opportunities for success of these ethnic enterprises as a result of newcomers experiencing heightened cultural identity and preferring services and products associated with their native country.21 In addition, these newcomer businesses often emphasize “high value added retailing” through offering such benefits as convenient hours, informal credit, fluency in native languages, and check-cashing services.22 Factors that increase the multiplier effect take on particular importance in the Merrimack Valley because so many regional forces work


against the recirculation of resources. Lowell is located close to the New Hampshire border with its many commercial malls; thus, Lowell’s downtown has had to struggle to avoid the dismal fate of most downtown commercial districts that continue to be decimated by competition from large commercial malls. For downtown districts in Massachusetts border communities, the impact has been particularly devastating as consumers have a larger incentive to shop in New Hampshire in order to avoid sales tax. The importance of newcomers’ propensity to purchase services and products from local immigrant businesses in all likelihood has enhanced this multiplier effect within the urban Merrimack Valley communities. The existence of a newcomer population also creates opportunities for what has been called import substitution. According to theories of import substitution, as an immigrant community grows, more native products will be imported in order to meet the growing demand for familiar items.23 The larger the volume of imports, the more opportunities there will be to start new enterprises aimed at producing these products locally. Import substitution strategies are starting to emerge in Lowell. The Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association (CMAA) and UMass Lowell have worked together, for example, to develop an import substitution strategy by which tilapia fish would be raised locally in tanks to meet a local market demand, thereby substituting for imported tilapia now sold in every Asian market in Lowell. In addition, the Center for Family, Work, and Community has begun to build formal links with local farmers and Southeast Asian restaurants with the goal of creating a mechanism by which local farmers could supply produce to Asian restaurants that currently use fish imported from Asia. Any analysis of how local immigrants and refugees impact their host communities must also consider the unique relationships between migrants in their communities in the United States and their country of origin. This phenomenon, called “transnationalism,” is increasingly the focus of attention by those attempting to understand the dynamics between migrants and their home country. The concept of transnationalism is used to describe the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.24 In transnationalism, “transmigrants, through their daily activities, forge and sustain multi-stranded social, economic, and political relationships that link together their societies of origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social fields that cross national borders.”25 Prior to the study of transnationalism, researchers typically oriented their attention to questions of how and why immigrants leave their country of origin and adapt to their new host


country.26 Emphasis is now being placed on understanding the nature of the continuing relationship between migrants and their country of birthplace and how this changing interplay evolves into complex political, economic, and social interactions. From the economic perspective, researchers have suggested that the success of transnational immigrant entrepreneurs may depend on their capacity to forge social networks between the country from which they came and the country in which they settled.27 However, it remains to be seen whether transnationalism is commonplace or whether transnational entrepreneurs are limited to certain groups or types of individuals. It is possible that transnational entrepreneurs are “a distinct class of immigrants who engage in these activities on a regular basis and who rely on them as their primary livelihood.’28 Some have argued that transnational entrepreneurs represent only a small portion of immigrant communities.29 Even if their numbers are small, these transnational business owners may represent a significant portion of all immigrant entrepreneurs. Furthermore, recent research indicates that these transnational entrepreneurs are often part of the “upper class” of their communities both in terms of educational and income levels, are more likely to be U.S. citizens, and have typically resided in the United States longer than other immigrants. At the same time, these transnational entrepreneurs are generally drawn from first generation immigrants.30 Within the Cambodian community, it appears that the level of transnational business activity and the demographics of those business owners who engage in transnational practices are consistent with what has been found in studies of other immigrant groups. The numbers of Cambodian entrepreneurs involved in transnational business activities in Lowell represent approximately 20–30% of the business community and tend to be concentrated in clothing, entertainment (CDs, videos, and DVDs), and travel. On average, these business owners have resided in the United States for many years, are U.S. citizens, and have higher income and educational levels than is typical within the Cambodian community. The forms taken by transnationalism appear to vary by the backgrounds of immigrants as well as by the circumstance that led to their leaving their home country.31 For example, a study of Columbian immigrants from urban areas concluded that they assimilated into the United States at an accelerated pace and minimized contacts with the sending country due to the considerable violence they left behind. In contrast, other studies found that immigrants from rural areas and small towns from peaceful sending countries were significantly more inclined to engage in transnational activities with their country of origin. In addition,


evidence indicates that migrants who assimilate into the host country are less likely to be involved in transnational actions. On the other hand, immigrants who live in large, concentrated communities of fellow natives and particularly those who experience hostile receptions from the host residents are more likely to engage in transnational activities. Another interesting finding it that some immigrants are actively engaged in transnational activities while assimilating in the host country and achieve upward mobility in both settings.32 While it is clear that transnational economic activities usually provide important financial support to the sending country, these same immigrants also share their economic resources, time, and loyalty with their host country.33 Transnational Political Activity and Its Impact on Community Development Above we focused on economic transnationalism; the impacts of political transnationalism must also be considered. Political transnationalism differs from economic transnationalism in focus but likely has an important impact on community development and social capital formation. Existing literature indicates that only a minority of immigrants (perhaps one in five) regularly involve themselves in political transnational action.34 Despite their small numbers, these individuals often play important leadership roles in immigrant communities. The types of transnational political activities vary. One framework for understanding transnational political action, for example, divides political practice into two levels, “narrow” activities, such as membership in a political party or civic association in the homeland, and “ broad” activites, such as involvement in meetings and events related homeland politics.35 Immigrants can become engaged in transnational politics in a variety of ways but in the local Southeast Asian community transnational activities generally involve either supporting or opposing homeland political parties and or governments. In Lowell, it appears that the number of Southeast Asians involved in “narrow” activities are low, probably less than 10%. The type and level of transnational political activities can affect local immigrant communities. For example, Lowell is home to the second largest Cambodian population in the United States and, as a result, all three major political parties from Cambodia have active party apparatuses within the Lowell community. The party in power, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is headed by Prime Minister Hun Sen. The second largest political group—the Royal Party—is now aligned with the CPP and has been an on-and-off coalition partner with the CPP. The Sam


Raimsy Party is currently the opposition party. Although only a minority of Cambodian immigrants in Lowell is active in any of the three parties, these party loyalties continue to loom large and, not infrequently, have led to conflict in Lowell that has negatively impacted local community development. These party activists often hold considerable influence within the community; thus, their distrust of each other often prevents community-wide collaboration on important initiatives. As this example illustrates, political conflict from the homeland can negatively impact community development efforts among immigrant communities within host cities. The ability of Lowell’s Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association (CMAA) to work in the community was compromised by CMAA’s collaboration with the Cambodian government on some high profile community events: ultimately, perceived transnationlism may have been a contributing factor in the ouster of the CMAA executive director. In 2001, the CMAA hosted a reception within the Cambodian community with the ambassador to the United States from the government of Hun Sen as the featured guest. In addition, the CMAA accepted two traditional racing boats from the Cambodian government for the Southeast Asian Water Festival and publicly praised Hun Sen for these gifts. At the time, both the board President and Executive Director were perceived by some members in the community as controlled by the Cambodian People’s Party and the country’s Prime Minister. Consequently, members of the community refused to support efforts and programs of the CMAA. Increasingly, leaders in the various parties in Lowell have begun to recognize the extent to which past conflicts have created negative consequences for the local Cambodian community. Consequently, these leaders have decided to not allow political disagreements in the homeland to create divisions that are detrimental to the local Cambodian community. Issues of transnationalism have also made themselves felt within Lowell’s Laotian community. Here the divisive issue concerned which of two Laotian flags would be seen as legitimate and therefore should be supported and honored by the Lowell community. Some members of Lowell’s Laotian community support the recognition of the current Laos flag, the same flag that has received official recognition from the United States and the United Nations. A minority of the community supports the flag of the Royal Government that was supported by the United States during the 1970s prior to the Pathet Lao communist government coming to power. Obviously, intertwined with this issue is the support of or opposition to the existing Lao government. As in most SEA communities, Laotians arrived in the United States in the late 1970s and early


1980s as political refugees of and opponents to the Pathet Lao communist government. Because at the time all Lao refugees arrived in opposition to this communist government, there was political unity within the community and this unity was conducive to building cohesiveness and community development. Within the last decade, things have changed. The current Laotian government, although still maintaining a one-party state, has begun to open the economy and has allowed political refugees who fled the communist takeover to return home and visit families. These changing circumstances are now creating a rift within Lowell’s Lao community, as the majority accepted this development as a positive change and they have begun to visit family and friends as well as accept the current government. A vocal minority, on the other hand, continues to hold the view that the flag of the former Royal government remains the only authentic flag and they continue to oppose the existing regime. As a result, divisions have emerged within the Lao refugee community that are now preventing people from collaborating to address local needs and issues within Lowell. Clashes in Models of Community Economic Development Emerge Between Immigrants and Nonimmigrants What is intriguing in the infrastructure developments just described is how embedded these activities appear to be. To some degree this should come as no surprise because such embeddedness is consistent with social capital ideas and the practices they seemingly promote. But what is also intriguing is that these practices are, on the one hand, at odds with some of the ongoing practices in the “mainstream” economic development infrastructure in the Merrimack Valley and, on the other hand, also encountering unexpected contradictions when the assumption is made that introducing a communal, social capital approach will be straightforward. This section will illustrate in some detail the contradictions and complications as seen through the lens of the development of the Asian American Business Association (AABA) and other infrastructures intended as alternatives to a Chamber of Commerce model and other mainstream models. Consider the traditional chamber model. Within such a model, a diversified group of businesses and corporations join a local chamber and pursue common interests. Because of the long history and acceptance of the concept of chambers of commerce in the United States, nonimmigrant individuals who choose to join generally understand why it is in their interest to join and what their involvement is likely to achieve.


For example, in Lowell the chamber focuses on professional development, networking, information exchanging and advocacy on large issues (e.g., in the Merrimack Valley the expansion of a major highway, creating a more favorable business climate, and support for large economic develop projects). The AABA was organized originally because at the time the local “mainstream” chamber had demonstrated little interest in reaching out to Asian businesses and addressing their particular needs. As a result, immigrant business owners had not joined the chamber. The need for an association of Asian business owners was clear as most Asian businesses were struggling to succeed and grow. Many newcomer business owners brought experience in business from their native country but they were unfamiliar with the steps needed to succeed in business here. For example, a few entrepreneurs purchased buildings in Lowell with the intent of relocating and expanding their businesses. However, those decisions were made without familiarity with local building codes and zoning requirements. These business owners unknowingly made decisions that created major problems for the creation and expansion of their businesses. In addition, many business owners were not yet familiar with the need for record keeping and tax filing on the U.S. laws. Those outside the Cambodian business community often regard the Cambodian business community as highly communal. Thus people often assume that the process of organizing an Asian business association along communal lines could be done with ease. In reality, the challenges are significant. As the AABA was being formed, many business owners resisted efforts to join together. A number of reasons for this resistance among business owners became apparent over time, including a lack of an understanding of and experience with a business association, a lack of a vision of how joining and participating in an association might be in their interests, suspicions and fears of exchanging information with competitors, and experience of Khmer Rouge collectivism and its impact on their willingness to participate in any sort of collective activity in the United States. The founders of the AABA wanted to focus on educating and advocating for the Asian businesses. This approach was consistent with the concept that economic opportunity develops through a process of learning, empowerment, and organizational building (such as the creation of networks and informal relationships).36 Accordingly, the first public session organized by the AABA included a CPA and the Building Commissioner of Lowell to help educate business owners to record keeping and tax filing issues, local building code and zoning requirements.


The AABA also saw as one of their goals assisting Asian businesses in expanding their customer base beyond the Southeast Asian community. An example of this happened when the AABA President invited the executive from a local hospital to a network session. At this AABA event, a board member who owns a wholesale business that supplies import products to Asian markets provided complimentary fruit drinks. During a conversation between this wholesaler and the hospital executives, it was suggested that the hospital consider selling these drinks in their cafeteria because of the large Cambodian community that uses the hospital. As a result, the Asian wholesaler is now a supplier to the hospital cafeteria. The intention of the AABA was to assist more Asian business owners to secure contracts to provide services and products to both large private and public sectors institutions. In this role, the AABA planned to be an advocate for Asian businesses to create opportunity for their inclusion as vendors to major businesses and governmental entities. Despite these laudable goals of the AABA, the development of the AABA struggled. One important barrier was the lack of startup capital for the organization. A second barrier was the surprisingly strong resistance among Asian business owners to joining a communal organization. In addition, perceptions that the first executive director was inexperienced also became a barrier. The first Executive Director and President were both under thirty years of age and were successful at developing relationships with local government and non-minority business leaders but failed to satisfy many board members and Asian business owners. The President and Executive Director believed that developing relationships outside the community was of primary importance, whereas others on the board and within the Asian community saw the development of relationships within the community as key. Other leaders in the AABA became disillusioned by a lack of organizing and organizational development within the Asian business community. After the attempt to organize the AABA, the leadership at the local chamber of commerce changed. Under the new leadership, the local chamber made a concerted effort to reach-out to Asian and other immigrant business owners. This outreach initiative organized focus groups and meetings in local Asian restaurants to begin a dialogue to determine what were the needs and issues of Asian businesses, to explain how the chamber may be of assistance in their business development, and to invite Asian entrepreneurs to become members and join the board of directors. Interestingly, the chamber’s efforts were of no avail, as Asian business owners again failed to become members or to fill board vacancies that were reserved for them. This unsuccessful attempt to attract


Asian entrepreneurs probably failed for some of the same reasons as did the AABA. In addition, it appears that many Asian business owners still see the chamber as a non-immigrant organization. In particular, the main activities of the chamber, such as organizing business mixers and networking sessions are probably not considered useful business opportunities by Asian entrepreneurs. Another reason that many felt a need for an Asian American Business Association at the time was that most existing business development programs failed to connect and assist the newcomer community because they expect the Asian business community to fit into and feel comfortable with a traditional approach. Many Asian business owners complained that business loan programs from the city and the Lowell Plan (and others) failed to help them. They considered the process to be bureaucratic, confusing, inflexible, and time-consuming. A recent experience of the Lowell Small Business Assistance Center with its Technical Assistance Program (TAP) provides an instructive example of this disconnect between traditional business development programs and the Asian business community. TAP was funded by the City of Lowell and required all businesses receiving technical assistance to provide copies of their tax return. Many Asian entrepreneurs initially expressed an interest in receiving technical assistance until they were informed that copies of tax returns were needed to receive services under this program. There appears to be a cultural gap that affects this disconnect. An explanation of this “disconnect” was offered at a meeting of the Lowell Small Business Assistance Center when a member of the AABA board tried to explain why most Asian business owners would not feel comfortable entering the Small Business Assistance Center or using its services. He went on to try to explain the underlying cultural issues. Because the Center was located in a newly renovated building in the downtown on the third floor, it would intimidate the community. This board member went on to explain that the difference between an Asian market and Market Basket Supermarket is that the latter supermarket is bright, new, well organized and clean in appearance. However, the Asian market was very different in appearance and the Cambodian business community would only feel comfortable in an environment that appeared Asian, not like an American corporation. Many governmental and traditional business loan programs also clash with the realities of the newcomer community. Traditional finance programs typically use certain ratios and criteria to evaluate the viability of newcomer businesses that really undervalue the strengths of these enterprises. This undervaluing prevents many newcomer businesses


from qualifying for traditional financing. Michael Swack, the Dean of the School of Community Economic Development at Southern New Hampshire University recalled an instance when a very successful and profitable restaurant run by an immigrant family was rejected for a business expansion loan. Afterwards, Michael Swack approached the bank to understand why this profitable restaurant had been denied financing. The banker explained that the ratio of food costs to gross sales was much higher than is typically found in the restaurant industry. When Swack approached the restaurant owner about this issue, the owner explained that he had a large family that basically lived at the restaurant and was fed there. In addition, he described how he often helped local families in need by feeding them for free in his restaurant. It was obvious that these factors would not be seen in a traditional restaurant and contributed to his food costs within the business but also to its success. Swack and the restaurant owner later met with the bank and educated the loan officer to these factors and the bank eventually approved the loan. The above examples are indicative of how traditional approaches to business and economic development can clash with the realities of what is needed for successful development in newcomer communities. Recently, within the Asian business community some practices have begun to change. The method of raising business capital among family and friends in an informal way has become less common, perhaps as a result of the few instances of individuals leaving the area without paying back business loans. In addition, younger immigrant entrepreneurs are adopting conventional business practices by using more traditional financing avenues and options. In addition, younger Southeast Asian business owners are beginning to expand into non-immigrant markets. For example, an Asian-owned real estate firm has an office in Lowell, staffed by Asian salespersons, that caters to the immigrants and another office in a nearby town, staffed by non-immigrant sales reps, that serves the non-immigrant market. Furthermore, some loan programs are now more flexible and younger immigrant entrepreneurs have become more accepting of traditional lending institutions. Moreover, the number of Asian entrepreneurs receiving assistance from the Lowell Small Business Assistance Center has increased to approximately 16%. Clashes in Developmental Approaches To understand how local governmental policies contribute to these clashes in the Merrimack Valley newcomer communities, it is useful to consider the two predominant basic models of local economic development.37 The


corporate center approach places the emphasis on economic development on real estate development, commercial and industrial attraction. The alternative approach focuses on economic development activities and goals of economically disadvantaged communities. Both of these approaches are entrepreneurial and involve some form of partnerships with the private sector. Under the corporate center approach, the private sector predominates and the public sector role is limited largely to creating an economic climate that is conducive to private investment (usually outside investment). The local planning process typically has the objective of general economic growth and tax expansion and is often inaccessible to immigrant, refugee, and other minority and low-income groups. Public sector resources are usually focused on serving the needs of private industries. Local government commonly spends a great deal of effort in attracting outside investors and companies. Generally, local officials will work to attract what is perceived to be high-growth sectors, such as tourism, high-end services, and high technology. In addition, the public sector will target companies who are considering moving headquarters or branch operations into the city. Furthermore, under this approach, local government will concentrate development in the downtown, particularly on larger real estate development projects. Moreover, most job creation activities are focused on highly skilled and white-collar workers. A more recent variation of this approach is the conversion of unused downtown commercial and industrial space to high-end condos and apartments to attract a higher income residential sector that will require a restaurant and service sector to meet their needs and desires. Under the alternative approach, the public sector attempts to guide and influence private sector investment decisions that will create desired economic development objectives that benefit the broad community. In particular, public sector planning objectives usually are accessible to and benefit low-income and newer immigrant and refugee groups. Local government will provide resources conditionally to the private sector to insure support of desired economic development options. These public sector interventions will usually benefit low-income and ethnic minorities directly (i.e. ESL programs, retraining of displaced workers, transportation, and childcare). In addition, city officials will target sectors that meet important local economic needs. The public sector will also target the development and expansion of locally-owned businesses with less emphasis on attracting outside establishments. Locations of development projects are usually decentralized and the focus is on a broader array of local labor needs, particularly on blue-collar, unskilled, and underemployed workers.


In many ways the latter model—with its focus on the development and expansion of local businesses—is more consistent with the approach that is emerging in the immigrant communities. Yet the city of Lowell has pursued a “Destination City” strategy that falls to a large degree under the corporate center approach. The city has invested considerable resources on large projects within the downtown in the hope that they will attract tourists. The focus has been on attracting outside developers, businesses, restaurants, and specialty shops as part of this strategy. However, the city has also used some aspects of the traditional approach as city leaders have conditionally provided resources that support their vision of economic development, which is more compatible with the corporate center approach. The city of Lowell has in recent years pursued a strategy to attract non-immigrant artists to the downtown. Policymakers believe that a visible artist community in the downtown will make their “Destination City” strategy more successful by attracting more tourists. While a serious shortage of affordable housing exists within the newcomer community, the city is investing considerable resources to build artist housing. By pursuing a more corporate center approach, the City of Lowell has overlooked how newcomer communities contribute to local economies. Newcomer communities bring assets, for example, that could support tourism or “Destination City” strategies, yet many of these assets have not been fully incorporated into the economic development strategies employed by local communities. For example, the successful marketing of newcomer restaurants and specialty shops has the potential to pump considerable dollars into a local economy. Many large cities have demonstrated the value of this approach, having successfully marketed ethnic neighborhoods, such as “Chinatown” and “Little Italy,” as important pillars to local tourism campaigns. In addition, the marketing of newcomer culture can generate sizeable income. The presentation of cultural festivals, ethnic artistic performances, and arts and crafts fairs have also generated considerable revenue on the local level. The examination of other key institutions in Lowell sheds additional light on these clashes in development approaches. The Lowell Plan was founded in 1979 as a nonprofit economic development organization to assist in the rebirth of the city. Since its inception, the Lowell Plan, which was financed and dominated by local banks, has pursued a supportive and parallel track to the initiatives carried out by the city of Lowell. The Lowell Plan has created loan programs for small business development and commercial downtown expansion. In addition, it has funded second mortgages for residential housing rehabilitation and first-time homebuyers


programs. However, the Lowell Plan has generally followed the traditional approach to community economic development by investing resources in the creation of strategic plans to revitalize and finance the downtown and major projects like the Tsongas Arena and the LeLacheur Park. The Lowell Plan has also supported the “Destination City” strategy by financing a marketing campaign to tourists by promoting the image of Lowell as a cultural and sport mecca. The city financed the promotion of the annual Lowell folk festival, general sporting, and cultural events. However, many in the newcomer community feel that the Lowell Plan has fallen short when it comes to promoting immigrant cultural festivals and programs to help immigrant businesses to position themselves to benefit from a local tourism strategy. The city of Lowell has not entirely neglected policies that fit more firmly within the alternative approach. In 1994, the city received a federal grant to become an Enterprise Community (EC). Under this grant, the neighborhoods in the city with the lowest incomes and highest concentration of newcomer groups were designated an Enterprise Community Zone. As a requirement of the grant, a board of directors was elected within these neighborhoods to oversee the project’s implementation. The majority of Enterprise Community board members were elected from among newcomer groups. Unlike the city of Lowell’s tourismdriven “Destination City” strategy, the Enterprise Community was directed by and focused on the immigrant community. Consequently, the newcomer community was viewed as an asset and activities were oriented to their needs rather than those of Lowell’s wealthier neighborhoods. The EC board funded a study to assess the skills, interests, and needs of residents within these communities. Based on this assessment, the EC established a RFP process to fund organizations that would provide services and programs to expand small business development, educational enhancement and ESL, job readiness and technical skills training, and expand child care. The EC invested in the human and social infrastructure of immigrant and low-income communities. As the examples in this section suggest, the city of Lowell’s decisions about economic development have broad implications for the future of Lowell and its newcomer residents. If the city were to adopt the alternative approach to their “Destination City” strategy, they would focus more on assets and needs that currently exist in Lowell. Instead of investing considerable resources in attracting outside restaurants and specialty shops they might look at the assets within the immigrant and refugee community that could attract tourists to Lowell. There are opportunities to develop markets and develop the ethnic businesses that are likely to


attract tourists. The successes in the North End and Chinatown in Boston as tourist attractions and economic development successes represent instructive examples of such an approach. Furthermore, the potential growth of newcomer businesses is limited when they are unable to sell goods and services to markets outside of their community.38 Conclusion These initiatives have helped us explore three questions: (1) What innovative infrastructure developments in the newcomer community have taken place in the Merrimack Valley? (2) What strengths of the newcomer community typically go unrecognized by traditional approaches to community economic development? (3) What clashes in models of community economic development emerge between immigrants and planners engaging in traditional practices? We have highlighted some novel infrastructure developments within the Southeast Asian community that have made important contributions to overall community development. Many of these are clearly embedded within the cultural experiences of these immigrants and refugees, such as the development of the Southeast Asian Water Festival, community-based organizations, informal lending methods, and transnational and locally-based ethnic businesses. Unfortunately, incorporated into these innovative infrastructures are the very assets of these newcomer communities that are unrecognized by the traditional community economic development players. The informal mechanisms and social networks that propel the startup and expansion of numerous Southeast Asian businesses and help ensure the long-term success of these enterprises are just a few of the strengths that have been undervalued by local government and non-immigrant civic and business leaders. In addition, the existence of transnational entrepreneurs in Lowell who depend on regular commercial activity with Cambodia for their economic prosperity is consistent with the experiences of other established immigrant communities in the United States. However, the clashes of models of community economic development between immigrants and nonimmigrants are quite evident within Lowell. This disconnect is hindering the ability of the Southeast Asian community to achieve its potential for community development. Furthermore, these clashes of models are preventing the assets within the Asian community from reaching their fullest potential. Unfortunately, unrealized community economic development assets within the Southeast Asian community have negative consequences within both the immigrant and nonimmigrant communities. Our hope is that our discussion of these


issues will contribute to a better understanding of how the immigrant and nonimmigrant communities can collaborate more effectively in order to enhance overall community development. Notes 1. See, for example, X, De S. Briggs, “Social Capital and the Cities: Advise to Change Agents,” National Civic Review 86 (2) (1997), 111–17; S. Callahan, “The Capital that Counts,” Commonwealth 123 (20) (1996) 7–8; H. Chang, “Democracy, Diversity, and Social Capital,” National Development Review 86 (2) (1997) 141–47; D. Fettig, “Rethinking Community Economic Development,” Fedgazzette 1 (January 1995); C. Flora and J. Flora, “Entrepreneurial Social Infrastructure: A Necessary Ingredient,” Annual of the American Academy 529 (1993), 48–58; C. Gardner, “Building Social Capital: The Case of Mineral County, Nevada,” Economic Development Review 14 (2) (1996), 60; M. Irwin, “Social Capital of Local Communities,” Metroscope (1998) 13–19; I. B. Kawachi, B. P. Kennedy, and K. Lochner, “Long Live Community: Social Capital as Public Health,” The American Prospect 35 (Nov/Dec 1997) 56–59; J. O. Gibson, G. T. Kingsley, J. B. McNeely, “Community Building: Coming of Age,” (1997), available at: http://www.urban.org/community/combuild.htm; G. Laws, “Globalization, Immigration, and Changing Social Relations in U.S cities,” The Analysis of the American Academy 551 (May 1997), 89–104; J. Messer, “Agency Communion, and the Formation of Social Capital,” Nonprofit and Voluntarily Sector Quarterly 21 (1) (1998), 5–12; R. Miller, “Healthy Boston and Social Capital: Application, Dynamics and Limitations,” National Civic Review 86 (2) (1997) 157–65. 2. M. Irwin, “Social Capital of Local Communities,” Metroscope (1998) 13–19. 3. Ibid. 4. A. Okagaki, “Strengthening Rural Economies: Programs that Target Promising Sectors of a Local Economy,” (Washington, DC: Center for Community Change, 1998), http://communitychange.org/default.asp. 5. Flora and Flora, “Entrepreneurial Social Infrastructure,” 48–58. 6. C. Gardner, “Building Social Capital,” 60. 7. G. T. Kingsley, et al., “Long Live Community Building Coming of Age.” 8. J. Jennings, “Social Capital, Race, and the Future of Inner-City Neighborhoods,” 5. 9. R. M. Silverman, “CDCS and Charitable Organizations in the Urban South: Mobilizing Social Capital Based on Race and Religion for Neighborhood Revitalization,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30 (2) (April 2001). 10. R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 11. R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).


12. D. J. Monti, Jr., “Old Whines in New Bottles: Robert Putnam, Richard Florida, and the ‘Community’ Problem in Contemporary America,” paper based on presentation to the American Sociological Association, San Francisco (2004). 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Chang, “Democracy, Diversity, and Social Capital,” 141–47. 15. Laws, “Globalization, Immigration, and Changing Social Relations,” 89–104. 16. A. Portes and M. Zhou, “Gaining the Upper Hand: Economic Mobility Among Immigrant and Domestic Minorities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15 (4) (1992), 491–522. 17. J. Santiago and J. Jennings, “The Latino Business Community of Lawrence, Massachusetts: A Profile and Analysis.” Reports can be obtained at The Institute for Community and Workforce Development, Northern Essex Community College (Lawrence, Mass., 2000). 18. Portes and Zhou, “Gaining the Upper Hand,” 491–522. 19. The multiplier effect is a quantification of the amount to which each dollar continues to circulate for a “multiplied effect.” See R. S. Browne, “Cash Flows in a Ghetto Community,” The Review of Black Political Economy 1 (1997); B. Harrison, “Ghetto Economic Development: A Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature 12 (March 1974), 1–37; W. H. Oakland F. T. Sparrow, and H. L Settler, “Ghetto Multipliers: A Case Study of Hough,” Journal of Regional Science II (December 1971) 337–45; R. L. Schaffer, Income Flows in Urban Poverty Areas (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973). 20. K. Wilson and A. Martin, “Ethnic Enclaves: A Comparison of the Cuban and Black Economies in Miami,” American Journal of Sociology 88 (1982) 135–60. 21. Portes and Zhou, “Gaining the Upper Hand,” 491–522. 22. M. Bendick, Jr. and M. L. Egan, “Business Development in the Inner City: Enterprise with Community Links,” Community and Economic Development (1991). 23. Please refer to the following sources: J. Persky, D. Ranney, and W. Wiewel, “Import Substitution and Local Economic Development,” Economic Development Quarterly (February 1993), 18; H. Shurman, Going Local (New York: The Free Press, 1998). 24. L. G. Basch, N. G. Schiller, and C. Blanc-Szanton, Nation Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and De-territories NationStates (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 6. 25. Ibid. 26. A. J. Portes, W. Haller, and L. E. Guarnizo, “Transnational Entrepreneurs: An Alternative Form of Immigrant Economic Adaptation,” American Sociology Review 67 (2002), 278–98. 27. Please refer to the following sources: L. E. Guamizo, “One Country in Two: Dominican-Owned Firms in the United States and the Dominican Republic,” Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, The Johns Hopkins University (1992); M. Zhou and C. L. Bankston, III, “Social Capital and the


28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

Adaptation of Second Generation: The Case of Vietnamese Youth in new Orleans East,” International Migration Review 28 (4) (1994), 775–99. Portes, Haller, and Guarnizo, “Transnational Entrepreneurs,” 284. Ibid., 278–98. A. Portes, “The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism,” Global Networks 1 (3) (2001) 181–93. Please refer to the following sources: P. Levitt, J. DeWind, S. Vetrosvec, “International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: An Introduction,” Center for Migration Studies of New York 37 (3) (2003), 565–75; A. Portes, “Conclusion: Theoretical Convergencies and Emperical Evidence in the Study of Immigrant Transnationalism,” Center for Migration Studies of New York 37 (3) (2003), 874–92. Levitt, DeWind, and Vetrosvec, “International Perspectives,” 565–75. R. Robinson, “Globalization: Immigrants’ Transnational Agency and Economic Development in their Homelands,” Focal (2004), 1–12. Please refer to the following sources: O. E. Nielsen, “International Migration Review,” Center for Migration Studies of New York, Inc. 37 (3) (2003), 760–87; Portes, “Debates and Significance of Immigrant Trasnationalism,” 181–93. Nielsen, “International Migration Review,” 760–87. Okagaki, “Strengthening Rural Economies.” Please refer to the following sources: J. E. Blakely and K. T. Bradshaw, Planning Local Economic Development Theory and Practice ( London: Sage Publication, 2002); C. J. Robinson, “Municipal approaches to Economic: Growth and distribution policy,” Journal of the American Planning Association 55 (1989), 283–95. T. Bates, “Urban Economics Transformation and Minority Business Opportunity,” The Reviews of the Black Political Economy (Winter 1984/ 1985), 21–36.

Chapter 7

From Africville to Globalville: Race, Poverty, and Urban Governance in Halifax, Nova Scotia Karen Bridget Murray*

ester B. Salamon has declared that a “global associational revolution” is underway that is both a cause and consequence of globalization. According to Salamon, globalization is not only realigning the relative positions of nation-states and corporations, but is also inextricably tied to a “powerful citizen sector . . . laying claim to an expanded voice on both the national and international stages.”1 Relying as he has on macro-level quantitative data, it is easy to see why he has come to this conclusion. There has been a worldwide quantitative expansion of voluntary sector activity, particularly since the 1960s. What Salamon does not address, however, is the qualitative dimensions of these changes, the types of civic engagement being promoted, and the role that political authorities have played in these processes. This chapter attempts to address these issues by presenting a preliminary assessment of the role that political authorities have played in shaping the “associational revolution” in the Gottingen district of Halifax, a part of the city with ties to Africville, a small Black community that was razed through a 1960s urban redevelopment scheme. In doing so, it shows how public officials have not only implicitly and

L

* Funding for this research, which is gratefully acknowledged, was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant No.832-2002-0114).


explicitly encouraged the expansion of civil society organizations but also they have done so in ways that have significant effects that are inextricably tied to processes of racial marginalization. In order to develop these arguments, the paper begins by setting out salient aspects of the Canadian context as well as some of the limitations in the scholarly literature attempting to grasp the significance of social capital to democratic governance. It then focuses on how the example of Gottingen shows the centrality of political institutions in shaping the valorization of certain forms of social capital and the racial implications of these processes. The Context In recent years, in Canada as elsewhere, urban centers have taken on a greater predominance in economic policy. Following worldwide trends, urban areas are now depicted as the engines of what is seen as an emerging global economy. This emphasis has gone hand in hand with a growing orthodoxy in relation to social policy that holds that civil society organizations are better placed to address issues of poverty and its various aspects of social and economic disadvantage. Although research on the role of the voluntary sector is still relatively in its infancy in Canada, evidence suggests that the Canadian context is not dissimilar to worldwide trends. Over the last several decades, and especially since the mid-1990s, Canadian governments have established a plethora of initiatives to promote a larger role for the nonprofit sector. The rationales of these programs often hinge explicitly on assumptions about the value of “social capital” to democratic institutions and processes. Voluntary and nonprofit participation is held up as a “public good” that engenders trust, reciprocity, information-sharing, and norms and sanctions capable of promoting stability and a sense of belongingness. Widely seen as vital nodes for achieving the health and well being of individuals, communities, societies, and political institutions, programs promoting the nonprofit sector have garnered the support of political authorities and voluntary organizations alike.2 The intellectual basis of social capital initiatives are rooted in ideas most famously set out by Robert Putnam in his Making Democracy Work.3 One of Putnam’s main claims was that the civic engagement that social capital brings forth precedes politics and government. The implication is that governments can neither tamper with nor modify social capital, leading to the pessimistic conclusion that you’ve either got it or you don’t. Policy initiatives aimed at engendering social capital are therefore anathema to Putnam’s central proposition. They raise the question of how political institutions might shape social capital itself, which

FROM AFRICVILLE TO GLOBALVILLE 135

is a point that Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized in the even more celebrated work Democracy in America. Recent work on social capital has returned to these Tocquevillean roots by seeking to understand the role that political institutions play in fostering specific forms of civic engagement; in doing so, they highlight the fallacy of assuming a relationship between social capital and strong democratic institutions.4 While these studies are adding new layers of analytical complexity to our understanding of the political implications of social capital, the racial ramifications of these processes remain largely unexamined. This is a major gap in much of the literature on these matters, and one that this chapter attempts to highlight by sketching out the centrality not only of political institutions, but also of racialized practices, in the shaping of norms concerning predominant conceptions of legitimate forms of social capital. An example drawn from the Regional Municipality of Halifax (HRM) is particularly illuminating. Located in the Province of Nova Scotia, Halifax was created in 1996 through a process of amalgamation of four formerly separate political units: a much smaller City of Halifax, along with Dartmouth, Bedford, and Halifax County. Amalgamation established the new Halifax as the thirteenth largest municipal population in Canada. With a population of 355,945, it is the largest urban center north of Boston and east of Quebec City. Almost 40% of Nova Scotia’s total population resides in the city, which constitutes 15% of the population of the four provinces that make up the Atlantic region of Canada. Comprising a geographical space of almost 6,000 km2, or about ten times the size of Toronto, Halifax is also a hub of commerce and industry on the East coast with a ten-billion dollar economy.5 In 2005, the Halifax regional government embarked upon a process of designing an urban development plan, focused on the inner city, which has a high concentration of visible minorities, as indicated in Figure 1. A large Black population is located in this locale in a district adjacent to the city’s main economic district. While the issue of race is not explicitly taken up in the proposed plan that was completed in 2006, the process designed to develop the plan holds significant racial implications. Before taking up this point, it is important to appreciate the historical salience of the Gottingen area to race relations in the city, and specifically to understand its links to Africville. Africville was a small Black community covering fifteen acres of land on the northern tip of the Halifax Peninsula that was settled in the eighteenth century. While its exact origins are unknown, much of its population arrived after the War of 1812 as refugees and many others were


Figure 1 Distribution of Visible Minorities in the Halifax Regional Municipality, 2001 Figure 1 was created by Andrea Kmetty and Shuguang Wang and printed here with permission from Metropolis Canada.

their descendants. Initially, the area was referred to as “Campbell Road” but by the turn of the century it had come to be known as Africville. The community had many attributes often celebrated in contemporary political debates as constituting strong social capital that included a school, a church, and a post office. According to Paul Erickson, “Seaview African United Baptist Church was the heartbeat of the community, staging demonstrative Sunday services, including a colourful sunrise service on Easter followed by spectacular baptisms in the waters of Bedford Basin.”6 Africville gave birth to and fostered the development of George Dixon, who went on to become a world boxing champion; Duke Ellington visited Africville to see his spouse’s father who lived there. While people living in Africville might have seen their community as vibrant, this was not how it was viewed and treated by political authorities. In 1854, the authorities allowed the Nova Scotia Railway to divide Africville in half, and later permitted two additional railway lines to be established only a few feet away from houses. The proximity of homes to these rail lines created several environmental hazards, including pollution from train stacks, noise, and a dangerous environment


for young children, several of whom were killed chasing after “trains to retrieve lumps of coal to heat their family homes.” In the late 1850s, the city created a depository for “night soil” close to Africville and established the Rockhead Prison about a thousand yards away. Later, in the 1870s, the Infectious Diseases Hospital was set up, which created further contamination around the Bedford Basin. “Besides all of this,” Erickson wrote, “Africville was encroached upon by huge power transmission towers, oil storage tanks, a coal-handling facility, a fertilizer manufacturing plant, and a slaughterhouse. The coup de grace came in the 1950s when the city relocated its open refuse dump a stone’s throw away.”7 Even as late as the 1960s, Africville was cut off from sewage and water lines offered in other parts of the city, even though residents paid taxes just the same.8 When urban development plans began to proliferate across North America in the 1960s, Africville became the focus of public attention. The former City of Halifax recruited Gordon Stephenson in the 1950s to devise an urban strategy. In his 1957 report, he described Africville in this way: There is a little frequented part of the City, overlooking Bedford Basin, which represents an unusual problem for any community to face. In what may be described as an encampment, or shack town, there live some seventy negro families . . . The citizens of Africville live a life apart. On a sunny day, small children roam at will in a spacious area and swim in what amounts to their private lagoon. In winter, life is far from idyllic. In terms of the physical condition of buildings and sanitation, the story is deplorable. Shallow wells and cesspools, in close proximity, are scattered about the slopes between the shacks . . . There are only two things to be said. The families will have to be rehoused in the near future. The land which they now occupy will be required for the future development of the city.9

The City decided to follow through on Stephenson’s recommendations for Africville and in the early 1960s, after minimal public input from the area’s residents, political authorities commenced the removal of Africville citizens from their homes. In recent years, the Africville Genealogical Society has been at the forefront of demands for redress for the former inhabitants and their descendants. Rather than sound urban policy, the razing of Africville has become an emblem of human rights violations. In 2001, Denise Allen gave a speech to the United Nations detailing the basis of these violations: First: The systemic denial of services and human rights. For example Africville residents were subject to the same taxation mechanisms as citizens of Halifax. However, they were never provided with basic amenities.


Petitions for public education, water, recreational and play ground facilities, ambulance services firefighters, paved roads, social assistance, garbage pick-up and removal, and even a cemetery were all denied. Second: Environmental Degradation. In this case city officials permitted the following to be established within walking distance of Africville homes and play areas: three systems of railway tracks; an open city dump; disposal pits for Halifax toxic waste; a hospital for infectious diseases; a stone and coal crushing plant; a toxic waste dump; a bone-meal plant; a cotton factory; a rolling mill / nail factory; a slaughterhouse; sewage disposal units; a prison; and a port facility for handling coal. Third: Racist Hiring Practices. For the municipal authorities of Halifax, Africville was used to host a fleet of toxic industries but its residents were to be denied access to well-paying jobs. In fact, employers reserved and hired whites for the better paying jobs. It was this practice that gave birth to nepotism and tokenism. This created an additional obstacle that only exacerbated the economic situation in Africville.10

As the history of Africville highlights, social capital is not a natural, selfevident, and quantifiable entity. Rather, attributes associated with social capital become salient through political practices that legitimize certain forms of civic engagement while devaluing others. Paradoxically, however, while Africville has become increasingly embraced as an integral aspect of Black history, a similar devaluing of Gottingen, which has close ties to Africville, has begun to unfold. The Africville relocation scheme brought many former residents to the Gottingen area to live in a 250-unit public housing development located in Gottingen: Uniacke Square. Like Africville, Gottingen shares many features that are said to be characteristic of strong social capital. It is a hub, not only for Black political activism, but also for fostering Black identity in arts and business. And, like Africville, Gottingen is marked by social inequalities that have been shaped in important ways by government policies. For example, until the 1970s Gottingen was Halifax’s economic hub. However, retail/commercial activity declined by 31% during the 1960s and 1970s, a time coinciding with the arrival of Africville residents. The dynamics shaping these transformations have yet to be fully examined. What we do know is that there was an apparent “White flight” that followed the creation of Uniacke Square, as Gottingen’s population declined by 5,400, or 42%. The one-time economic hub came to have one of the highest poverty rates in the city. While recent figures are unavailable, the 1996 census showed that 65% of the 4,494 area residents had low incomes, and 26% relied upon some form of government


support. The number of renters also swelled during these years from 7% to 83%. Importantly, numerous voluntary and nonprofit social organizations, the supposed bedrocks of social capital, emerged along the Gottingen corridor. Ninety percent of these entities were established in the 1980s and 1990s, which provides another measure of the extent to which social disadvantage came to mark the vicinity. The changes that unfolded in Gottingen in the last three decades of the twentieth century were unique in the city. No other part saw this combination of transformations. In the 1990s, while a reverse trend emerged as the area showed signs of re-gentrification, poverty rates remained high.11 While government policies were important to shaping the racial character of Gottingen, they were also significant to the emergence and persistence of high levels of economic and social disadvantage. First, after the 1960s, even though political authorities made promise to invest in the area, they never followed through. Second, changes in other policy areas augmented and deepened social inequalities emerging in Gottingen. Perhaps nowhere was this more obvious than in the general government retrenchment from social programs that took shape especially in the 1980s and 1990s.12 During these years, welfare incomes as a percent of the poverty line were dramatically decreased. In 1989, they were at 50% of the poverty line, in 1996, they were at 43%, and in 2003, they were down to 31%.13 Cuts were accompanied by the increasing expectation that private, nonprofit, and voluntary welfare organizations, such as those that proliferated in Gottingen, would fill in the gaps. This context of governmental abdication of responsibility for the social and economic well-being of citizens would obviously play out more harshly in an area such as Gottingen, which was already suffering from the effects of economic decay. This historical setting is important when considering governmental programs aimed at harnessing the nonprofit sector in the area of social welfare. In the Canadian setting, research has shown that such initiatives, while ostensibly aimed at empowering local organizations and groups, are often based on rationales geared towards programs and services attempting to regulate “problematic” people. One study found that such programs individualize social problems and attempt to treat the risks they pose for mainstream populations. Harm reduction strategies are emblematic of these sensibilities, as they treat social inequalities as the product of subjective conditions detached from broader structures beyond an individual’s control.14 These orientations are woven into the fabric of institutions that are required to adapt to government regulations and funding guidelines.


Recent research has shown that such policies are transforming local organizations as they become more inwardly focused on organizational survival. This survival, in turn, is predicated upon the existence of people living in poverty or who are otherwise socially and economically disadvantaged. Without social inequalities, organizations would lose their modus operandi as defined by broader political dictates. What we see here, in other words, is a dynamic interplay between the wider institutional framework and the activities of local nonprofit entities. While this complex relationship has not been fully explored, it is clear that assumptions about social capital as a free-forming manifestation of vibrant democracies are seriously flawed. In the case of Gottingen, as with Africville, institutions have fostered social disparities; in Gottingen, moreover, they were similarly bound up with the proliferation of civil society entities. With this backdrop in mind, we can now see the racial ramifications flowing from the recent effort at devising a plan for Halifax’s future. The process of developing a plan was aimed at providing “direction on how growth and development [would] occur . . . over the next twenty-five years with regards to the environment, economy, settlement, transportation and Harbour.”15 With the launching of the regional planning process political officials were positioned to fulfill earlier promises for development, but as was the case with Africville, they would pay little regard to Gottingen’s significance to the Black community. The working draft of the regional plan stated that one of the aims was to recognize the city’s diverse citizenry, community, and geography but not one of the guiding principles explained what this meant in practice. Only a general reference was made to preserving and promoting “sustainability of cultural and historical assets.”16 The value of these attributes was not their importance to the protection and enhancement of the lives of individuals and groups but rather it was the presumed economic worth of these attributes that was considered salient. These economic objectives hinged on the concept of the “Capital District,” which was defined as including the most urbanized areas of the city: Downtown Halifax, Downtown Dartmouth, Gottingen, Spring Garden Road, and Quinpool Road.17 The Capital District’s importance was said to rest on its $80 million tax base, concentration of jobs, and attractiveness as a tourist destination that was reported to contribute $613 million and 82,000 jobs to the city’s economy.18 In short, the Capital District was described as the “regional and provincial center for government, finance, culture, entertainment and business,” but the primary emphasis was on its economic potential. In the Capital District framework, Gottingen was defined, along with the


other local areas, as “belonging” to “every resident” of the city.19 To the extent that people living in Gottingen were to be included in the public consultations, they would do so as individual members of the wider Capital District rather than as members tied together by common historical, economic, political, racial, social, or affective bonds. No regard was given to evaluating how the needs and aspirations of its members were met. So, for example, while there was an obvious need for repairs to social housing units in Gottingen, the draft plan only mentioned the area in relation to the need to bury electrical power wires as part of a “beautification” strategy. While it is the case that Gottingen residents might have mobilized to push for their own demands to be included in the Regional Plan, it is easy to see how difficult this would be. First, the area is one already socially and economically marginalized, which means it is an area already at a disadvantage in terms of the resources at its disposal to mobilize politically. Second, the frame of reference of the planning process circumscribed the range of issues that were considered to be legitimate to the dialogues. In short, the goals and rationales of the working plan ensured the primacy of position of the vision of urban development designed by political authorities. Given this backdrop it is perhaps not surprising that in August 2006, when the regional plan was waiting the provincial government’s approval, the eighty submissions made during the public consultation process were found to be: supportive overall, although [there were] many suggested additional small changes to consider. Many of the suggested changes were already covered in the draft plan and had been contemplated (for future functional plans). In these instances, clarification was all that was needed. A few errors were picked up which have been corrected.20

In other words, the final document, like the draft, failed to address the historical significance of Gottingen’s Black community or how the urban plan would protect and foster the area’s unique identity and contributions. The regional plan was just that: a plan. But it was also a representation of how Halifax was perceived from the standpoint of those who devised the plan. So it was not benign or devoid of political import unless implemented as written. Sprinkled with platitudes about diversity, the plan was a manifestation of dominant political rationales that helped to define forms of civic engagement that would be promoted and encouraged and those that would not. The echoes of Africville are impossible to miss.


Conclusion Debates about the relationship between social capital and democratic governance often depict the former as a self-evident manifestation existing a priori in society and expressed through institutions. Many observers, however, are returning to the Tocquevillean approaches to these issues by focusing more centrally on the role of institutions in shaping specific forms of civil associations. In doing so, they have encouraged greater attention to contextual dimensions that define the political salience of social capital. This chapter has argued that race is an important feature of these processes but that it is often overlooked in these discussions. As the example of Gottingen illustrates, historical legacies, defined and shaped by race relations, are inextricably woven through the institutional fabrics upon which governments are now more actively seeking to harness voluntary and nonprofit energies. As this study has shown, this shift is intertwined with modifications in wider social, economic, and power structures, and simultaneously implicated in processes that marginalize and silence racially disadvantaged areas. The historical moments of Africville and Globalville are perhaps not as far apart as they might seem. Notes 1. L. M. Salamon, “The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector,” Foreign Affairs 73 (4) (1994), 109. 2. K. Murray, “Do Not Disturb: ‘Vulnerable Populations’ in Federal Government Discourses and Practices,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research (2004), 50–69. 3. R. M. Putnam, R. Leonardi, and R. Nannetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 4. A. Fried, “The Strange Disappearance of Alexis de Tocqueville in Putnam’s Analysis of Social Capital,” in Social Capital: Critical Perspectives on Community and “Bowling Alone,” S. L. McLean, D. A. Schultz, and M.B. Steger (eds.) (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002); W. Maloney, G. Smith, and G. and G. Stoker, “Social Capital and Urban Governance: Adding a More Contextualized ‘Top-Down Perspective,” Political Studies 48 (2000), 802–20. 5. Greater Halifax Partnership, “Demographics” (n.d.), http://www.greater halifax.com/locate/en/home/facts/demographics/default.aspx (retrieved October 20, 2005); Halifax Regional Municipality, “Get with the Plan: Regional Planning Goals and Objectives,” January 27, 2004; Halifax Regional


6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Municipality, “Halifax Regional Municipality: Key Map,” http://halifaxinfo .com/HfxRegionalMunicipality.pdf (retrieved October 24, 2005); Nova Scotia, 2001 Census of Canada: Nova Scotia Perspective (Halifax: Department of Finance and Statistics Division, 2002). P. A. Erickson, Historic North End Halifax (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 2004), 130. Ibid. H. McCurdy, “Africville: Environmental Racism,” in Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, L. Westra and P. S. Wenz (eds.) (UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995). J. J. Nelson, “The Space of Africville: Creating, Regulating and Remembering the Urban ‘Slum,’” in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, S. Razack (ed.) (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002): 211–232; G. Stephenson, A Redevelopment Study of Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957). D. Allen, “Lessons from Africville,” addressed to the Plenary Assembly, September 6, 2001. shunpiking: the Discovery Magazine. Annual Black History Supplement 2002, http://www.shunpiking.com/bhs/Lessons%20 from%20Africville.htm. B. Melles, “The Relationship Between Policy, Planning and Neighbourhood Change: The Case of the Gottingen Street Neighbourhood, 1950–2000,” unpublished Masters Thesis, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, Department of Urban and Rural Planning (2003), 47–49, 73, 78–79. G. Carr, J. Bowden, and J. and J. Storrer, “New Directions in Municipal Services: Competitive Contracting and Alternative Service Delivery in North American Municipalities,” ICURR, June (1997); M. J. Skelly, “Alternative Service Delivery in Canadian Municipalities,” ICURR, February (1997). National Welfare Council, “Welfare Incomes Over Time as a Percentage of the Poverty Line, Single Employable People in Atlantic Canada,” (2005), http://www.ncwcnbes.net/htmdocument/reportWelfareIncomes2003/East_ Fig5_SingleEmployableCharts_e.pdf (Retrieved October 24, 2005). Murray, “Do Not Disturb,” n. 2. HRM, “Guide to HRM’s Draft Regional Plan,” (Spring/Summer 2005). HRM, “Principles, Goals, and Objectives,” (n.d.), http://www.halifax.ca/ regionalplanning/RegionalPlanning/GoalsObject.html (retrieved October 22, 2005). HRM, “What is the Capital District?” (n.d.), http://www.halifax.ca/ capitaldistrict/CapitalDistrict/CapitalDistrict.html (retrieved July 25, 2006). HRM, “Capital District” (Summer/Fall 2003), 1, 4, http://www.halifax.ca/ regionalplanning/publications/CDNewsSept2003.pdf (retrieved July 25, 2006). Ibid. HRM, “Response to Public Input: Draft No. 2: Regional Plan” (n.d.), http:// www.halifax.ca/regionalplanning/ResponsetoPublicInputDraft2Regional PlanFeb2006.html (retrieved July 25, 2006).


Chapter 8

The Political Use of Social Capital in New Zealand Richard Davis*

n this chapter I examine some features of the use of the term “social capital” in New Zealand in the mid 1990s during the government of the National Party led by Prime Minister Jim Bolger. Social capital became a popular term in sociopolitical discourse following a high profile visit to New Zealand by Robert Putnam in August 1996. As policy researcher David Robinson wrote, “The interest created by Professor Putnam and the subsequent discussion provided a challenge for us to move beyond debating whether he had adequately described the situation in Italy and the US to consider the relevance of the social capital concept to New Zealand.”1 This relevance moved not only from the United States and Europe to New Zealand, but also from description to prescription through social capital’s relevance to policymaking and direction. The mid-1990s was a time of social conflict in New Zealand as the New Right strengthened their resolve to disestablish the welfare state and “free up” the New Zealand economy. Bolger’s National government continued and intensified the economic rationalization begun by the Labour Party in the 1980s under Prime Minister David Lange and his finance minister Roger Douglas. I will argue here that the entry into

I

* This is an expanded and updated version of a paper presented to the Annual General Meeting of the Association of Non-Governmental Association of Aotearoa (October 14, 1997).


these contentious times of the concept of social capital did not really alter anything on the political landscape or in ways of thinking, it simply became another concept over which the government, together with its allies, fought for control in order to advance its own agenda. This trend has continued into the present Labour Party administration, despite the diminishing popularity of social capital in recent years. My analysis is based on a functional definition of “social capital.” The literature on social capital features numerous definitions (or leaves it undefined), but for the purposes of this paper I offer and defend the following definition of social capital—Social capital refers to the features of social interaction that occur in voluntary groups, communities, and relationships that can be relied on to create or preserve wealth. This is not necessarily a new definition of social capital as others, including Robert Putnam, have referred to its “productive potential.”2 Yet Putnam may complain, as others might, that mine is an overly capitalistic definition and ignores the fact that social capital is a public good and hence more social than capitalistic. However, I believe that there is much evidence from its use in New Zealand (and Australasia more generally) in the 1990s, and more recently, that supports such a definition, both in its saving and earning potential. I will show that, given this definition, we should not be complacent, or even pleased about the use of the concept “social capital” by New Zealand governments and the New Right. This definition assumes that social capital has something in common with other forms of capital. We are all familiar with financial capital that aims to create surplus value. There are now other sorts of capital being talked about. “Human capital,” for example, in the words of Lester Thurow “is defined as an individual’s productive skills, talents, and knowledge. It is measured in terms of the value (price multiplied by quantity) of goods and services produced.”3 In a recent book, Thomas Stewart defined “intellectual capital” as “intellectual material—knowledge, information, intellectual property, experience—that can be put to use to create wealth.”4 He proceeds to argue that this intellectual capital is replacing physical capital, such as land, factories, and labor in the creation of wealth. In a capitalist social system most forms of capital are assets owned by individual people or corporations that are invested for a return. Social capital is different from other forms of capital, it is argued, because it is social in nature and not owned by any individual but is truly a collective good on which all in the community can draw without charge. It is different in another important way. Social capital, qua capital, is being promoted for the saving of money—rather than direct earning of a return

THE POLITICAL USE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN NEW ZEALAND 147

(the idea that a penny saved is a penny earned). I believe that this is made clear in the ways the New Right changed the fundamental manner in which they viewed and described society in the late 1990s. The New Right Context The socioeconomic context of New Zealand in the 1990s was one where New Right ideology was prominent, and where free market capitalism was running rampant over people and the community. Between 1990, the year it took office, and 1996, the National Government did the following things to advance the cause of the free market: • Passed The Employment Contracts Act, which led to a reduction in union membership and was a negative influence on unions generally • Cut welfare benefits in 1991 through finance minister Ruth Richardson’s “mother of all budgets” • Privatized strategic state assets against the will of the public • Reduced social spending in key areas such as health, education and welfare • Cut taxes for the already well off, which increased inequality There are many more examples of socially-damaging Government actions over the reform years 1984–1999, but these will suffice for the points I wish to make about social capital and community. Part of the New Right strategy has been to set the terms of debate regarding the natural organization of society. This analysis was often reductionistic and Manichean. Everything was either a function of the state or the market. The New Rightists then demonized the state, and hence it followed that because the state is bad, the market must be good. Part of this process was to deny the existence of a third or community sector. As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously remarked, “There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” This was a New Right shibboleth until the mid-1990s when “society” was rediscovered—along with “social capital.” For instance, the Australian New Right think tank, The Centre for Independent Studies, declared in a 1990s issue of their newsletter Precis, “there is such a thing as society,” as if this were something new. They have since published a collection of papers on social capital.5 However, the recognition of society, community, and social capital did not mean that the New Right agenda had changed or had become socially responsible. A new term entered the lexicon, but the basic direction of


policy remained the same. This involved attempts to ensnare the meaning of the term “social capital” in order to serve New Right ideology. In New Zealand, Roger Kerr of the pro-business lobby group Business Roundtable also joined the chorus in praise of social capital. In a speech given in August 1996, he likened Robert Putnam’s theory of social capital to David Green’s notion of “civil society.”6 In his book, From Welfare State to Civil Society (published by the Business Roundtable), Green suggests that rebuilding civil society will involve two steps. First, the government should withdraw from some activities, presumably welfare. Second, champions of liberty should establish voluntary associations for assisting the less fortunate and run them in a spirit compatible with liberty.7 In a later speech, Kerr continued the attack on the state and argued that trust in the marketplace is “a form of social capital.” He went on to say that “it is more easily eroded by the uncertainties generated by arbitrary government intervention than by the operation of the market.”8 In viewing the government’s involvement in provision to the needy as a barrier to social capital, and arguing for more charity, I believe that the New Right use of “social capital” is consistent with my definition. Their line is that productive capital, such as state-owned power and telecommunication companies, can be privatized to retire government debt and make profits for private capitalists. Social capital, on the other hand, can save taxes and hence preserve profits through the community taking over social welfare provision from government. Doing this on a largely voluntary or subsidized basis enables the government to reduce its expenditure and thereby permit tax cuts to be given to the wealthy. The way Bolger’s Government used the term “social capital” in the late 1990s was similar to this. Let’s turn now to the Prime Minister’s speeches and those of his Cabinet colleagues. Prime Minister Bolger and Social Capital The former Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, used the term “social capital” in no fewer than twelve major speeches. While he failed to define the term adequately, he used it in a way consistent with my definition. It is clear that Bolger saw social capital as a means of saving taxpayers’ money through further limiting the role of government. He stated, “it’s now recognised that Big Government didn’t work in the economic field and my argument is that by itself it can’t deliver in the social field either, and that we need a partnership between Government and the community to start rebuilding the ‘social capital’ of the nation.”9


For Bolger, “social capital is not about the Government simply throwing money at society’s most stubborn problems.”10 In an abdication of responsibility for New Zealand’s social disorder he said, “social capital is about the community successfully achieving progress towards solving society’s ills.”11 Here the blame for society’s ills is either being avoided or placed where the supposed solutions lie, with the community. Again we see social capital being available to government to reduce its costs through removing activities from the state. But instead of these activities ending up in the commercial sector, they are being pushed into the third or voluntary sector. Hence Bolger wanted to “tap into the energy of community organizations.”12 Here social capital is not earning money, it is saving money for the government. Ministerial Use of Social Capital There were numerous other uses of “social capital” in speeches by other ministers in Bolger’s cabinet during 1997. In April, Christine Fletcher, then Minister of Women’s Affairs, spoke about service delivery coordination for families at risk. She noted that “any Government desiring change in this area must take the public with them, particularly women’s organisations by demonstrating overwhelmingly that their motivation is a genuine attempt at improving the social capital of our country for families rather than fiscally driven from a narrow welfare perspective.”13 In a May 1997 speech entitled “Focusing Government on What it Does Best,” Simon Upton said: The Prime Minister in recent speeches has made the point that power is flowing back to individuals and the intimate communities in which they gather; that there is a realisation that people managed to live together in a civil and peaceable way before the arrival of big government and central planning; and that its failure makes it important for us to rediscover how organic communities reproduce themselves by maintaining “social capital.” He made a call to ‘get the government out of people’s lives when there is no need to be there and to be there when that is what a modern civilised society would expect.’ It’s an important challenge and one that should make us think about the entire reach of government.14

Another minister (and future leader of the National Party) Bill English, Minister of Health, in opening the Royal College of Psychiatrists Conference in September 1997, claimed that he had been thinking about


what makes good health policy. The broad principles he came up with were these: The first thing is we want to organise our services and our funding around the patient and the community. Secondly, we can greatly improve health services with no extra money by building better relationships between the carers, and their clients. A third principle is that we’re looking for local solutions to local problems. The fourth and final principle is that decisions about resources and clinical decisions should be made as close to the need as possible. These four principles tie in well with the idea of social capital. They are about putting power back into the community, about dealing with needs as nearly as possible to where those needs are. Communities are built up, and grow creatively, when each individual is respected and where relationships are nurtured.15

These three speeches show that social capital was being used as a means to justify, and soften up the public for, further cuts in government spending. Fletcher says that we need more social capital and less welfare. English argues that more mental health services can be delivered with the same or less money provided social capital is present. Upton argues, in typical New Right fashion, that we can cut back government, and as a result taxes and social services, if we have enough social capital. In the New Right era it was predictable that the uncritical acceptance of social capital as a policy mechanism would mean the devolution of unprofitable state functions to community groups. The thinking behind this is that this devolution will save the Government money. Put simply: what the community does for free the state doesn’t have to pay for. This was confirmed by government official Gerald Scanlan of the central government agency The State Services Commission at a conference on social capital run by the Institute of Policy Studies in July 1997. Scanlan claimed: The concept [of social capital] has been introduced into policy debate by the Prime Minister and other Ministers, who have made a connection between social capital and the role of government in modern, democratic, capitalist societies. The concept provides a platform for making the cases for smaller, smarter and more collaborative government, whose role is more one of enabling individuals, families, communities and local authorities to make the best decisions about those aspects of life which are closest and most important to them rather than one of making decisions for them.16

This focus on cost-effectiveness and lowering transaction costs of government signals a direction toward smaller government and lower taxes


based on the transfer of ownership to the private sector and service provision to the community sector. Community Alternatives The concept of “social capital” was used by the New Right to justify a reorganization of society that will suit them. They believed that it was best for communities to run things rather than the state. Lest this article be read as an apologetic for big government I should state that I agree with their basic notion—I do believe that it is better that communities run things in their own interest rather than rely on the state, on terms similar to subsidiarity. For example, few, if anyone, would suggest that the state run sports clubs. But communities doing more can only work, and should only take place, under certain circumstances. The present roles of state, market, and non-governmental sectors exist for historical reasons. If changes are to be made they must occur with full community consultation and an appreciation of this history. It can be damaging for the government to opt out of services, forcing nongovernmental organizations to pick up the pieces. If the community is to take on a greater role there must exist a strong sense of community, and the community must not only be willing and able to take back tasks from the state, they must desire such a change and be prepared for it. Despite their claims about the benefits of high levels of social capital, Bolger’s administration was accused time and time again by critics as destroying communities and the very basis of social capital with its New Right policies.17 Throughout the 1990s the decline of unions, increasing inequality, the decline of trust in elected representatives, and reductions in social spending all acted against fostering community by pitting different sectors of society against each other. The policies I mentioned before all contributed toward a breakdown in community in New Zealand. With increasing inequality, people have diverging, if not opposing, interests. Those who can afford private education, health, and policing regard paying taxes for the public provision of these services an unnecessary burden. This was a point not missed by the libertarian ACT political party, which promised tax rebates for those who have private education and health insurance.18 When the Labour Party returned to power in 1999 it had a different focus from both the more rightist National Party and the previous Labour government. Like Tony Blair’s Third-Way Labour Party in the United Kingdom it promoted social democracy. Soon after being elected, Labour implemented an assessment of the state of the government-voluntary sector


relationship through the Community and Voluntary Sector Working Party. Their report shed light on the reality behind the social capital rhetoric of the former National government. The report’s Executive Summary begins: More than a decade of social and economic change and state sector reform has left many in iwi [“tribal”] and community organisations mistrustful of government and feeling undervalued and disempowered. Finding a way to overcome this lingering negativity and proposing a way forward to a relationship based on mutual respect is the focus of this report.19

The report finds that the very organizations that the social capitalists wished to use for service provision were becoming increasingly strained and resentful toward government. Community organizations were particularly frustrated with the contracting model whereby government funding for services was provided through competitive contracts with strict reporting requirements and intrusive scrutiny. Their capacity to fulfill their own missions was being undermined at the same time the government expected them to rebuild social capital and deliver social and economic benefits to the New Zealand citizenry. Social Capital Now In twenty-first century New Zealand one rarely, if ever, hears the term “social capital.” It is no longer fashionable in New Zealand policy discourse, with other terms and concepts, such as “social connectedness” and “social cohesion,” being more common now.20 As I have shown, the mid-1990s saw a flurry of activity around the concept of social capital, usually in attempts by New Rightists to co-opt the term into their own socio-political agenda. While social capital is less popular now, this trend has continued, with other groups and political parties using the term for their own ends. Interestingly the rhetoric has now changed. Whereas the right wing National Party used social capital to justify funding and service cuts, the unions and the more left-leaning Labour Party are more willing to link social capital with economic growth. This features both using the future reward of economic growth to justify focusing on social capital, and invoking social capital in the pursuit of economic development. From the left, social capital has been invoked by trade unions seeking better conditions for workers. In December 2002 Human Rights Commissioner Rosslyn Noonan cited Putnam and social capital in a


work-life balance campaign by the financial sector union Finsec, urging that this life balance was essential to the building of social capital.21 Without a balance between working and the rest of life workers will not be able to play a role in the voluntary sector and contribute toward the development of social capital. The implication is that workers will, once freed from onerous overtime, give back to the community and create enhanced conditions for wealth creation. The justification for the work/life balance was based on, even in the words of the Human Rights Commissioner, on economic values, such as “labour productivity” and “economic and social development.” The Labour Government, which defeated the National Party in the General Election of 1999, has occasionally used the term “social capital,” but in ways different from its predecessor. Robert Putnam revisited New Zealand in 2003, attending the agenda-setting Knowledge Wave Conference in Auckland. Minister of Social Development Steve Maharey also hosted him at Parliament in Wellington, perhaps in an attempt to reclaim the social capital concept for the Labour Party, following its prominent use by the National Party. For Maharey, economic growth was an important part of the focus on social capital, as his newsletter reported, “building greater levels of social capital is an integral element in his [Maharey’s] social services and employment portfolio. The social development approach adopted by the government recognises that social institutions and networks are important elements in building not only social cohesion but also sustainable economic growth.”22 Fellow Labour Minister Peter Hodgson also linked social capital with economic growth in a speech to The Social Policy Research and Evaluation Conference 2003, “Connecting Policy Research and Practice.” He praised Robert Putnam for highlighting “the importance of social capital for economic growth.” Hodgson also focused on the “increasingly complex ways this Government has seen growth. New ideas linked to innovation, social capital and creativity are being woven into our ideas about growth.”23 It seems ironic that Putnam and the concept of social capital is being utilized by two opposing political parties. This does not show the ability of social capital to transcend party political differences and bring about a new political consensus. Rather it shows that the term is flexible and has malleable meaning. But these developments are consistent with the definition I proposed at the outset. New Zealand remains a Western democratic capitalist society. While Labour is committed to a more social democracy, the wealth generation capacity of social capital remains central to its politics.


Conclusion With social capital now being less fashionable it is timely to assess its past use in New Zealand. In summary the New Zealand use of the term “social capital” shows how the term has been co-opted for pre-existing political, social, and economic agendas, particularly during its heyday in the mid- to late-1990s. Common amongst New Right activists and politicians was a desire to utilize social capital in order to justify their policies and call for decreased government involvement in welfare. Social capital sounded like a plausible alternative since it used the word “social” and softened the language of economic rationalism typically invoked for the reforms New Zealand went through. Social capital has been linked more latterly with economic growth, partially to reassure corporate interests that Labour’s social democratic agenda is not solely socially focused but is pro-business and committed to economic growth. Overall, social capital was treated primarily as an economic resource that governments wished to use to save money or to promote economic growth, often paying little attention to the community and voluntary sector, where social capital was supposed to grow. Notes 1. D. Robinson (ed.), Social Capital and Policy Development (Wellington, N.Z.: Institute of Policy Studies, 1997), 1. 2. R. D. Putnam, “Social Capital” (1995), http://www.pcdf.org/1995/76putnam .htm (retrieved December 6, 2006); also see R. D. Putnam, R. Leonardi, and R. Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 152–57. 3. L. C. Thurow, “Investment in Human Capital,” Wadsworth Series in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1970), 1. 4. T. A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1997). 5. This was published as A. Norton, M. Latham, G. Sturgess, and M. StewartWeeks, “Social Capital: The Individual, Civil Society, and the State,” Policy Forums 14 (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Centre for Independent Studies, 1997). 6. R. Kerr, “The Road Back from Social Decay to Social Cohesion,” (1996), http://www.nzbr.org.nz/documents/speeches/speeches-96-97/soc-decay.doc .htm (retrieved December 6, 2006). 7. D. G. Green and New Zealand Business Roundtable, from Welfare State to Civil Society: Towards Welfare That Works in New Zealand (Wellington N.Z.: N.Z. Business Roundtable, 1996), 117.


8. R. Kerr, “What’s All This About Individualism?” (1997), http://www.nzbr .org.nz/documents/speeches/speeches-97/individualism.pdf (retrieved December 6, 2006). 9. J. Bolger, “Together Communities,” (1997), http://www.executive.govt.nz/ speech.cfm?speechralph=12868&SR=1 (retrieved December 6, 2006). 10. J. Bolger, “The Millennium Agenda,” (1997), http://www.executive.govt.nz/ speech.cfm?speechralph=12851&SR=1 (retrieved December 6, 2006). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. C. Fletcher, “Celebrating the Past and Looking Forward,” (1997), http://www.executive.govt.nz/speech.cfm?speechralph=12821&SR=1 (retrieved December 6, 2006). 14. S. Upton, “Focusing Government on What It Does Best,” (1997), http://www.executive.govt.nz/speech.cfm?speechralph=13074&SR=1 (retrieved December 6, 2006). 15. B. English, “Opening Address Royal College of Psychiatrists Conference,” (1997), http://www.executive.govt.nz/speech.cfm?speechralph=12541& SR=1 (retrieved December 6, 2006). 16. G. Scanlan, “The State Services Commission’s Interest in Social Capital,” Social Capital and Policy Development, David Robinson (ed.) (Wellington, N.Z.: Institute of Policy Studies, 1997), 160. 17. See, for example, J. Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment? (Auckland N.Z.: Auckland University Press, Bridget Williams Books, 1995). 18. Both education and healthcare is provided free by the state in New Zealand. 19. Ministry of Social Policy, “Communities and Government—Potential for Partnership Whakato-Pu-Whakaaro,” Ministry of Social Policy (ed.) (2001). Iwi is a Maori word for “tribe.” Many NGOs in Aotearoa New Zealand are run by Iwi for their members. 20. Recent publications of the Ministry of Social Development will reveal the current terms and concepts in vogue in New Zealand policy development. See http://www.msd.govt.nz/. 21. Finsec, “Finsec Launches Get a Life Campaign,” (2002), http://www.nzctu .org.nz/campaigns/getalife.html (retrieved December 6, 2006). 22. S. Maharey, Maharey Notes 83 (2003), http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ ViewNewsletter.aspx?DocumentID=16116 (retrieved December 6, 2006). 23. P. Hodgson, “Connecting Policy Research and Practice,” (2003), http://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/events/strategic-social-policy/ conference-03/pete-hodgson.doc (retrieved December 6, 2006).


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Contributors

LISA GARCÍA BEDOLLA is associate professor of Political Science and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Her research focuses on the political incorporation of Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups in the United States, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. RICHARD DAVIS was the first executive officer of the ecumenical Churches’ Agency on Social Issues in New Zealand. He has since worked for the New Zealand public service in the Office for the Community and Voluntary Sector. Richard has graduate degrees in both political philosophy and theology. JAMES JENNINGS is professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. He has published widely in the areas of race and urban affairs. His latest books include Welfare Reform and the Revitalization of Inner City Neighborhoods (MSU Press), and a coedited volume, New Introduction to Poverty: Race, Power, and Wealth (NYU Press). He was guest editor for the issue “Race, Politics, and Community Development in U.S. Cities” for The Annals, Journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (July 2004). JESSICA KULYNYCH is a political theorist and independent scholar. She has published articles on the impact of postmodern and feminist theory on contemporary understandings of political participation and public deliberation. She is also working on a book-length project exploring the incorporation of children’s voices into the democratic public sphere. DANIEL MONTI is professor of Sociology at Boston University. The author of five books and dozens of published papers on urban and ethnic affairs and American civic life, Monti is writing a book about the

172 CONTRIBUTORS

practice of civic capitalism and a novel about a killing that occurred in Boston’s fabled North End. He also created InnerCity Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit organization that provides technical assistance to businesses that are prepared to grow and become more effective economic players. KAREN BRIDGET MURRAY is assistant professor of Political Science at York University (Toronto, Canada). Her research draws upon contemporary social theory to assess governmental realignment from street-level vantage points in Boston, Dublin, and Vancouver. A major emphasis in this work concerns the growing centrality of voluntary organizations in dealing with issues of poverty and disadvantage. Her recent work has appeared in The Canadian Historical Review, Canadian Journal of Urban Research, and Canadian Public Administration. LINDA SILKA is University of Massachusetts Lowell Special Assistant to the Provost for Community Outreach and Partnerships. She directs the Center for Family, Work, and Community and is a professor in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development. She is author of the book Intuitive Judgments of Change (Springer Verlag) and editor or co-editor of three new books: Citizens as Planners (UMass Press, in press), with E. Hamin and P. Geigis, Education for Sustainability (Baywood, 2006), with R. Forrant, and Scholarship in Action: Applied Research and Community Change (HUD, in press). STEPHEN SAMUEL SMITH is professor of Political Science at Winthrop University and frequently writes about urban politics and school desegregation. He is the author of Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte and served as an expert witness for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund in the reopened Swann (bussing for desegregation) litigation. He is currently doing a comparative study of anti-war movements in U.S. history. DAVID TURCOTTE is a Project Director at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Family, Work, and Community. He has more than twenty years of nonprofit and community development experience. Earlier, he managed the UMass Lowell CIRCLE (Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment) Program that provided technical assistance and capacity-building training to leaders of the minority and immigrant community. He is an adjunct faculty member of the University of Massachusetts Lowell Department of Regional Economic and Social Development and recently completed his doctoral dissertation, “A Framework for Sustainable Housing Development in the United States” (University of Massachusetts Lowell, 2006).

CONTRIBUTORS 173

RUSSELL E. WILLIAMS is assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Wheaton College (MA). Prior to joining the Wheaton faculty he had an extensive career in public policy-related research institutes. He has designed and implemented evaluation projects for the U.S. federal government in the areas of housing and small business development. His chapter is adapted from his doctoral dissertation “Social Networks and Labor Market Outcomes, Theoretical Expansions and Econometric Analysis” (University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005).


Index AABA, see Asian American Business Association Adams, John, 35–6 Africville, 133, 135–8, 140–2 Alinsky, Saul, 57, 61 American Economic Association, 76 American Political Science Association, 50, 87 American Sociological Association, 48, 63 apathy, 7, 93–4, 112 Arnott, Richard, 74–6 ascriptive terms, 10 Asian American Business Association (AABA), 121, 122–124 Asian American business owners, 121–5 Asian American communities, 5, 73, 96, 114–29 associational density, 94 Australia, 147 Black communities, 3–4, 5, 9–10, 15–16, 70, 73–5, 91–3, 96–8, 100, 112, 135–41; middle class, 91, 98; and social capital, 9, 100, 136, 138; stereotypes of, 93–4, 97, 100. See Africville; Gottigen district Blair, Tony, 151 bohemian communities, 23–4, 28, 29 Bolger, Jim, 145, 148, 149, 151 Bolshevik Revolution, 51 Boston, 23, 25, 28–30, 75, 91, 96, 98–9, 101, 129, 135 “bounded solidarity,” 116 Bourdieu, Pierre, 45–7, 65, 88

Bourdieuconomics, 88 Bowling Alone, 7, 41, 47, 54, 57, 61 Cabrini Green neighborhood, 97 Cambodian American communities, 114–20, 122–4, 129 Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association (CMAA), 114–15, 117, 120 “Campbell Road,” see Africville Canada, 133–42 capitalism, 42–6, 48, 50–9, 61–3, 146–8, 153; character of, 56, 58–9 Center for Family, Work, and Community (CFWC), 110, 115, 117 CFWC, see Center for Family, Work, and Community chambers of commerce, 121 Chicago, 97 China, 26, 50 city life, 22, 31 civic engagement, 7–9, 13–17, 42, 47, 51, 63, 89, 94, 99, 103–4, 111, 112, 133–5, 138, 141; and capital, 51; context and community in, 13–16; as social capital, 42; status of, 2, 7–8, 12, 21–2, 25, 30–1, 35, 37–8, 47; structural factors, 15–17 civil rights movement (1960s), 9, 11, 14, 26–7 “civil society,” 133, 134, 140, 148 civil society organizations, 133–134 CMAA, see Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association Coleman, James S., 46–7, 49, 53, 60, 62, 65, 78

176 INDEX

collective activity, 12–14 Communist Manifesto, 51 competition, 43, 56, 58–9 consumer-citizens, 52 Cortes, Ernesto, 57–9, 61–2 “creative class,” 3, 4, 23–30 “creative economy,” 23–5 cultural capital, 45–6, 48 democracy, 2, 5, 11, 22, 26, 35, 39, 42, 47, 49–51, 54–5, 58, 60, 63, 93–4, 100, 134–5, 140, 142; and capital, 51; civic habits, 22, 26, 39; economic theory, 49; social capital, 134–5, 140, 142; urban democracy, 93–4. See also social capital (the term): democracy Democracy in America, 35, 135 Denmark, 88 desegregation, 9, 95 Dewey, John, 45 diversity, 15, 28, 29, 113, 115, 141 dominant ideology thesis, 61–2 Dorchester, Massachusetts, 91 Douglas, Roger, 145 economic capital, 45–6, 63 economic development, 1–2, 67–8, 71, 79, 88, 102, 110–30; alternative approach, 126–8; community, 111–14, 121–30; corporate center approach, 126–8; engines of, 114–19; international, 68, 71; local, 1–2, 68, 71, 88; pro-growth logic of, 102; social capital in, 67–8 economic imperialism, 44, 49–50, 53, 58 environmental racism, 143, 164 Europe, 21, 26, 54, 145, 147, 151 Federal Housing Authority (FHA), 10 FHA, see Federal Housing Authority financial capital, 42, 53–54, 58, 63, 70, 88, 113, 146

Finland, 88 Fletcher, Christine, 149–50 Florida, USA, 91 Florida, Richard, 22–5, 27–33, 35–6, 112–13 Ford, Henry, 11 French Revolution, 47 gatekeepers, 14, 16–17, 93 gay communities, 23–4 gentrification, 96, 103, 139 “global associational revolution,” 146 globalization, 51, 113, 133 the “good ole days,” 4 Gottingen district, 133–5, 138–42 Green, David, 148 Greeks, 29, 31 Halifax, Nova Scotia, 5, 133–42. See Africville; Gottingen district Hanifan, Lyda J., 45, 51, 65 Hitler, Adolf, 11 housing discrimination, 10, 73, 75 human capital, 46, 48, 67, 70–1, 76–7, 79, 88, 146 human capital theory, 67, 71, 76–7, 79. See “opportunity structures” Hun, Sen, 119–20 immigrant communities, 5, 101, 109, 113-116, 118, 120, 127, 129 import substitution, 117 individualism, 35, 43, 56, 58–9, 63 Industrial Areas Foundation, 4, 57–9, 61 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 57 industrialization, 21, 26 intellectual capital, 146 Italy, 7, 47, 145 IWW, see Industrial Workers of the World Japan, 26, 104

INDEX 177

Kerr, Roger, 148 keywords, 44 Khmer Rouge, 122 labor market discrimination, 74 labor market theory, 67–9, 71–83. See search theory Labour Party, 6, 145–6, 151–4 laissez-faire racism, 19, 158 Lange, David, 145 language, 2, 4, 43–4, 49, 52–63, 112–13; defines social reality, 44, 53; stock market, 52–5, 58; welfare, 59 Laotian community, 120 Las Vegas, 28 Latino communities, 4, 10, 16–17, 70, 73, 93–6, 98–100, 103, 113 Lawrence, Massachusetts, 95, 99, 100, 101, 113 liberty, 35, 39, 148 “linked fate,” 13–14 low-income communities (U.S.), 1–6, 54, 87–104 Lowell, Massachusetts, 114–28, 129 Lowell Plan, 124, 127–8 Lowell Small Business Assistance Center, 124–5 Lowi, Theodore, 50, 52 Maharey, Steve, 153 Making Democracy Work, 7, 47, 52, 57, 93, 134 Marcuse, Herbert, 42, 56, 60 Marshall, Alfred, 45 Marx, Karl, 45, 50–1 Marxism, 50–1 McCullough, David, 35 McNally, David, 43–4 McVeigh, Timothy, 41, 56 Menchaca, Martha, 14 Merrimack Valley, 114, 116–17, 121–2, 125, 129 middle class, 3, 9, 10–11, 88, 91, 97–102. See “creative class”

Milligan, Melinda, 22 Minneapolis, 96 Mitchell, Clyde J., 71, 80–2 the multiplier effect, 116–17, 131 National Party government, 145, 147, 149, 152–3 neo-classical architecture, 102–3 neo-classical economics, 44, 54 New Right, 6, 11, 145–54 New York City, 103 New Zealand, 5–6, 145–54 Ohio, 15 “opportunity structures,” 77–8 Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, 95 physical capital, 46, 70, 88 Portes, Alejandro, 48–9, 63, 68, 89, 101, 113–14 post-World War II generation, 7, 11–12, 17 poverty, 1–4, 8, 15–16, 59, 88–90, 96, 98–9, 106, 112, 134, 138 power, 2, 4, 45–6, 48 Progressive movement, 51 public policy, 1, 3–6, 44, 50, 52, 69, 71, 78, 81, 87, 90, 95–102, 134, 138–42; and bureaucracy, 44, 50, 52; civic participation, 1, 95–7; racism. See Africville; Gottingen district Putnam, Robert D., 4, 7–14, 16–18, 21–3, 25–7, 30–6, 38, 41–3, 47–9, 52–3, 56–7, 60–2, 65, 67, 88–9, 92, 112–13, 134–5, 145–6, 148, 152–3; criticisms of, 7–9, 11–14, 17, 22–3, 25–7, 30–4, 41–3, 49, 52, 56–7, 61–2; on public policy, 134–5; self-criticisms, 41; status of social capital, 7, 9–12, 17–18, 21, 25–6, 30–2, 35. See also civic engagement; race; social capitalists; working-class solidarity

178 INDEX

race, 1, 8–9, 10–14, 17–18, 70, 73, 87, 90–5, 112, 133–42; de-racialization of social capital, 91–5, 112; and public policy in Halifax, 133–42 racial inequality, 2, 5, 87, 90–2, 97, 102–4 racism, 2, 87, 114 refugee communities, 109–10, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 126, 128, 129, 135 reservation wages, 71–2 Robert Taylor Homes, 97 Roxbury, Massachusetts, 98–9, 101 Royal Party, 119 Salamon, Lester B., 133 Sam Raimsy Party, 119–20 San Francisco, 23, 28–9 Santiago and Jennings, 99, 107, 113, 131, 167 Scanlan, Gerald, 150 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 39 search theory, 67, 71–2 self-help initiatives, 21, 92, 112 self-interest, 53–4 segregation, 5, 10–11, 14 Skocpol, Theda, 21 Smith, Adam, 54 “social apartness,” 14 social capacity, 44, 63 social capital: bonding, 41, 56, 60, 89; bridging, 41, 60, 89; consumer-citizens, 52; corporate agendas, 3–6, 54, 101–4, 112; democracy, 134–5, 140, 142; economics, 4, 48–50, 54, 88–90, 110; a glue, 1–4, 92–3; and government, 97, 103, 145–54; heterogeneity, 15; and leadership, 89; and social networks, 68–71, 80; “stock” of, 1, 11, 53–4, 60, 91. See civic engagement; context; race; social capital (the term); social relations; voluntary sector; a “wonder drug,” 90, 97 social capital, (the term), 4, 42–63, 68–9, 78–83, 87, 90, 109, 111–12,

146–7, 153; and democracy, 42, 49–50, 54–5, 58; historical context of, 42–4, 50–1, 61–3; impedes understanding, 4, 42–3, 48–9, 54, 60, 62–3, 90; a keyword, 44, 62; meanings of, 4, 8, 45–9, 68–9, 85, 87, 90, 109, 111–12, 146, 153; in politics, 52–5, 60–2; and poor people, 58–60; popularity of, 44, 49–51; and power, 46, 48; and social networks, 78–9. See capitalism; social capacity; working-class solidarity social capitalists, 41, 43, 54, 61–2, 152 social connectedness, 14 social context, 70–4, 80, 90–1 social networks, 4, 10, 14, 67–71, 75–84, 89, 91, 111; characteristics of, 81–3; homogenous, 10, 14; and labor markets, 67, 70–1 social order, 42, 103 social reality, 44, 48, 53 social relations, 8–9, 13–14, 18, 42–3, 46, 57, 80, 117 social sciences, 48–9, 67, 69–70, 78, 90 “society,” 147 solidarity, see working-class solidarity Soviet Union, 50 spatial effects, 74 spatial inequality, 1–2, 5, 87, 90, 97, 101–4 spatial mismatch hypotheses, 67, 71–6 Stewart, Thomas, 146 structural inequality, 4, 6, 90, 112 Swack, Michael, 125 Thatcher, Margaret, 147 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 26, 35–6, 38–9, 135, 142 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 35 tourism, 126–9 transnationalism, 110, 117–21, 129; economic, 117–19; political, 119–21

INDEX 179

trust, 2, 7, 17, 26, 30, 32, 51, 56, 60, 68, 69, 83, 86–9, 92, 99–101, 148, 151–2; and capital, 51

voluntary sector, 133–4, 139–40, 148–53 volunteering, 21, 32–3

UAA, see Urban Affairs Association unemployment, 4, 72, 95 Uniacke Square, 138 United Nations, 120, 137 United States: and “associations,” 26, 38–9; civic identity and race, 2, 4, 10–17. See capitalism University of Massachusetts Lowell, 10, 114–15, 117 Urban Affairs Association (UAA), 52–4, 87 urban communities, 3–4, 6, 70, 88

Wacquant, Loic J. D., 2–3 “weak links,” 69 welfare, 3, 6, 59, 77, 91, 95–6, 139, 145, 147–9, 150, 154 Welfare State to Civil Society, 148 White communities, 2, 5, 9–12, 15–17, 70, 73, 91–2 White flight, 9, 138 working-class solidarity, 43, 48, 51, 56–7, 60, 62–3, 93–4 Wuthnow, Robert, 22 Young, Iris, 61

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Incorporations: Race, Nation, And The Body Politics Of Capital

Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power: Buffalo Politics, 1934-1997

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