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Social Capital: Building Social Capital
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Social capital, which is based on trust, reciprocity, networks and collective action, takes time to develop and needs particular and concrete attention. Yet it is easy to destroy by focusing development efforts only on other aspects of capital. For example, urban renewal can more quickly move people from a dilapidated neighborhood into a new development without consulting the group and by not working with the group in planning the procedures. But ignoring social capital can mean long term unsustainability of manufactured capital. Buildings may soon deteriorate because social capital has been destroyed and dependencies on outsiders created.
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Social capital takes many different forms. It can be the neighbor down the street who knows all the children and is willing to help out in an emergency. Social capital can be the local police officer who coaches Little League, or volunteers who come together each year to organize a Relay for Life event. In fact, this powerful "community glue" can be the bowling league or the families in a local 4-H club. Wherever you find people coming together, building relationships, or networking to get things done, you will see social capital at work improving your community.
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Falk and Kilpatrick (1999) argue that the accumulation of social capital is the outcome of the process of learning interactions. Learning interactions require a learning event (an actual occasion) and occur in a contextual dimension (the broad, socio-cultural and political frame of reference). A precondition to building social capital is the existence of a sufficient quantity and quality of learning interactions. For example Falk and Kilpatrick suggest that quality learning interactions includes an historical context, external interactions, reciprocity, trust, shared norms and values. The planning and implementation of community projects may be one such learning interaction.
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Despite the possibility that a society has have too much social capital, it is doubtless worse to have too little. For in addition to being a source of spontaneously-organized groups, social capital is vital to the proper functioning of formal public institutions. It is sometimes argued that it is more useful to compare societies in institutional rather than cultural terms. Chalmers Johnson, for example, argues that differences in Japanese and American economic policy is not culturally based, but simply the result of the fact that Japan had MITI and the United States did not.18 The implication is that were the US to create an equivalent of MITI in Washington, it would have similar consequences. But there are any number of reasons for thinking that different societies have different cultural capacities for institution-building. Japan's deployment of an economic planning agency with enormous power over credit allocation did not lead to the same levels of rent-seeking and outright corruption that comparable agencies have brought about in Latin America or Africa (or indeed the US, were it to follow Japan's example).
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According to Putnam and his followers, social capital is a key component to building and maintaining democracy. Putnam says that social capital is declining in the United States. This is seen in lower levels of trust in government and lower levels of civic participation. Putnam ... says that television and urban sprawl have had a significant role in making America far less 'connected'. Putnam believes that social capital can be measured by the amount of trust and "reciprocity" in a community or between individuals.
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Other authors (Sabel, 1994) argue that social capital builds up as a result of all actors committing themselves to ongoing negotiations based on shared understanding of common goals. Hechter (1987) suggest a multistage process for building group solidarity. Having joined together members must devise rules and procedures, which get institutionalised over time. Internalising rules and procedures, members moderate their behaviour so that these correspond to the expectations others have. This build up of social capital – of formal rules and mutual expectations – facilitates extending group activities into previously unexplored areas.
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Building Social Capital