LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Social Capital: People
built 630 days ago
"Social capital is trust available to all members of a community (e.g. family, customer base) often protected by trademark, other brands, labels, flags, trust symbols. human capital includes these relationships and expectations and experiences of trust. When questioned or measured, such trust is reduced, so it should be audited only at times and by people who are not amenable to conflict of interest. Credit ratings for instance determine disbursement of financial capital"
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The political function of social capital in a modern democracy was best elucidated by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, who used the phrase the "art of association" to describe Americans' propensity for civil association. According to Tocqueville, a modern democracy tends to wipe away most forms of social class or inherited status that bind people together in aristocratic societies. Men are left equally free, but weak in their equality since they are born with no conventional attachments. The vice of modern democracy is to promote excessive individualism, that is, a preoccupation with one's private life and family, and an unwillingness to engage in public affairs. Americans combated this tendency towards excessive individualism by their propensity for voluntary association, which led them to form groups both trivial and important for all aspects of their lives. This stood in sharp contrast to his native France, which was beset by a much more thoroughgoing individualism than the United States.
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Social capital refers to the intangible resources embedded within interpersonal relationships or social institutions. Social capital can exist in three major forms: as obligations and expectations, as information channels, and as social norms. Obligations and expectations can be conceived of as a "credit slip" that people hold, and that can be cashed when necessary. Information channels provide appropriate information as an important basis for action. Social norms provide the criteria for rewarding or sanctioning individual actions.
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It is clear that the norms that produce social capital are partible, that is, they can be shared among limited groups of people and not with others in the same society. While social capital exists in all societies, it can distributed in very different ways. Families are obviously important sources of social capital everywhere. But family structure differs from one society to another and the strength of family bonds differs, not simply from family ties in other societies, but relative to other types of social ties. In some cases, there appears to be something of an inverse relationship between the bonds of trust and reciprocity within kinship groups and between kin and non-kin; while one is very strong, the other is very weak. What made the Reformation important for Weber was not so much that it encouraged honesty, reciprocity and thrift among individuals, but that these virtues were for the first time widely practiced outside of the family.
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Fourth, states can have a serious negative impact on social capital when they start to undertake activities that are better left to the private sector or to civil society. The ability to cooperate is based on habit and practice; if the state gets into the business of organizing everything, people will become dependent on it and lose their spontaneous ability to work with one another. France had a rich civil society at the end of the Middle Ages, but horizontal trust between individuals weakened as a result of a centralizing state that set Frenchmen at each other through a system of petty privileges and status distinctions. The same thing occurred in the former Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, where the Communist Party consciously sought to undermine all forms of horizontal association in favor of vertical ties between Party-State and individual. This has left post-Soviet society bereft of both trust and a durable civil society. There are, of course, good reasons why countries should restrict the size of their state sectors for economic reasons.
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Social Capital is the value of the positive social connections that people can draw on to solve individual and common problems. These social connections are created through social and civic activities in the community. While reports show that social capital is on the decline, the USF Collaborative, along with its Resilience Working Group, have made sustaining and creating social capital outlets in Tampa Bay its top priority.
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