Comments on Social Capital, by Alvin Wolfe, updated September 2002, after a 2001 draft in contemplation of an Aspen Institute Roundtable/Annie E. Casey Foundation Initiative on the topic.

There are at least two major issues here:

The first is defining social capital so that it refers to something meaningful to neighborhoods and communities as well as to theoreticians -- something seen as useful and measurable.

The second issue is developing techniques of measuring that useful something that we are calling social capital, techniques that are simple enough to be practical and accurate enough to be consequential.

On Definitions of Social Capital

The matter of defining social capital so that it refers to something meaningful to neighborhoods and communities has at least two aspects: “meaningful” to neighborhoods and communities and not just to individuals, and “meaningful” to neighborhoods and communities and not just to theoreticians.

Social capital has been used in a variety of ways in the literature, but those variations always include connections among people and organizations, in other words, networks of some kind. It is important to recognize explicitly that network models are applicable to various levels of any system we address. We do analyze networks of individuals, of course, but those personal networks connect immediately to others: role networks, intraorganizational networks, interorganizational networks, activity networks that reach to other social entities. So the concept connects directly to “building healthy communities and producing better outcomes for children and families.”

In a paper originally presented at the Sunbelt Social Network Conference in Sitges, Spain, in 1998, Karl van Meter reported that cognitive mapping of the keyword "social capital" reveals "little coherence and few clear divisions"(van Meter 1999:62). "The obvious conclusion is that 'social capital' covers too wide an area to have yet developed an internal structure in the last 27 years" (p.67). Among the 103 authors whose works van Meter analyzed, 15 wrote 40% of the articles. Pierre Bourdieu wrote 5 articles using social (or cultural) capital, James Coleman wrote 4 such articles. Neither of them is considered a "network scholar." But after them, most of the authors working on measurement of social capital (for example, Dornbusch, Flap, Frank, Ghoshal, Lin, Mateju, Nahapiet, Rose, Snijders, Stanton-Salazar, Wacquant, Yaumoto, Zhou, et al.) are, indeed, network analysts.

Clearly, there is thus far no consensus among theoreticians or measurement specialists. But good and useful analyses of social networks over many years have been contributing to the understanding of the phenomena that many are now referring to as social capital. In his conclusion, van Meter refers to "bandwagon science." Some of that is now going on, authors trying to tie their work to metaphors that don't have well-defined meanings but are associated with popular works. We must try to find that ground where there is meaning not only to the theoreticians and professionals but also to practitioners – both professional practitioners and lay persons in neighborhoods and communities.

The situation is something like this: Because information is not spread evenly throughout neighborhoods and communities, individuals and families have differential access not only to direct resources but also to knowledge about resources. Knowledge about needs is also differentially held with similar results. Knowledge about transportation resources is differentially held and so is knowledge about transportation needs. To fully comprehend this kind of situation one needs a model of the complete social network which would focus attention on the relationships between persons, the relationships between organizations, and the relationships between persons and organizations. It is across these relationships that information must flow. It is when relationships are lacking or when relationships for one reason or another do not effectively transmit information that people are not optimally utilizing the resources that are there in the community.

A first step for any individual, or for any organization that aims to help individuals, is to get some appreciation of what people and organizations are in the community, what resources they have, and how they are related to each other. That whole can be modeled as a network and such a view of it would help optimize choices that individuals and organizations make to achieve their goals. That first step is the difficult one of assessing the assets that are out there and discovering the linkages among them. Social networks include all the relationships and personal contacts through which individuals develop and maintain their social identity and through which they give and receive emotional support, goods, services, and, above all, information. In any community, effective solutions to some felt needs may be developed by maximizing the existing natural social networks of residents and by helping agencies serving the community to collect and to share more information, and by facilitating additional links between individuals and services. The full network can be seen as involving three sets of network data: the network of persons, the network of organizations, and the "dual-mode" network of persons and organizations.

On Measuring Social Capital

Some of the specific concepts within network analysis that are meaningful and measurable include:

Network centrality measures: closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality;

Structural measures: cliques and cohesive clusters, structural equivalence.

Measures of change: changes in centralities, clustering, equivalencies over time.

Network analysis can be seen as involving three sets of network data: the networks of persons, the networks of organizations, and "dual-mode" networks of persons and organizations.

In 2001, Marcela Gutierrez and I were working with an ongoing program the goals of which were perfectly aligned with the priorities of the Aspen Roundtable RFP. That program is the Equipo program of Abriendo Puertas, Inc., in Little Havana, Miami, Florida. Abriendo Puertas’ Equipo – Family Neighborhood Team – is a system of service delivery composed of natural helpers and a group of service providers that work together to provide a comprehensive continuum of care for children and families. The natural helpers, Madrinas and Padrinos, are neighborhood residents that actively do case finding, outreach assessment of needs, and services planning, all from a strength-based perspective. Dr. Marcela Gutierrez, through the University of South Florida and CRO, Inc., of Philadelphia, had a contract with the Annie E. Casey Foundation to evaluate the Equipo project and she subcontracted with Alvin Wolfe of the University of South Florida to analyse some network data collected in that process. That work was consistent with the goals of the Aspen Roundtable. We knew some of the difficulties of collecting network data from a population in which many are undocumented aliens from a variety of countries (newcomers to Little Havana are least likely to be Cubans). We also knew how eagerly some individuals take up the madrina/padrino role which requires a great deal of networking skills and knowledge.

Working jointly with Abriendo Puertas in helping them develop in these directions fit perfectly with the Aspen Roundtables statement of one of its priority issues: to define key elements of the process of community change and develop accurate measures of them that can be used by practitioners, policymakers, funders and researchers.

Noting that the Aspen Roundtable expresses “particular interest in the development of measures that make use of innovative techniques, tools or instruments; multi-disciplinary approaches; and new electronic technologies” we must mention that we are using special programs on laptop computers for our data collection in the ongoing evaluation of Equipo. These can be improved upon in the proposed project, along the lines discussed in a forthcoming publication entitled “Electronic Ethnography” (Wolfe and Hagen, forthcoming chapter in Methods book edited by Michael Angrosino).

REFERENCES TO SOCIAL CAPITAL

Some authors and references relevant to social capital/cultural capital (compiled by A.W.Wolfe, 1997-2001)

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Boston, Little, Brown, 1892.

Baker, Wayne E. 2000. Achieving Success Through Social Capital.

Boissevain, Jeremy. 1974. Friends of Friends.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique: Precedee de trois etudes d'ethnologie Kabyle. Geneve:Droz,

pp 227-343.

Bourdieu Pierre. 1980. Le Capital Social: Notes Provisaires. Actes

de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. 3:2-3.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. DISTINCTION

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U.of Chicago Press.

Burt, Ronald. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992.

Clark, John Bates. 1899. The distribution of wealth; a theory of wages, interest and profits. New York, The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan, 1899.

Coleman, James. 1986/1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Chap. 12, Social Capital.

Coleman, James. 1990. Parental Involvement in Education. Policy Perspectives. Washington: U.S.Department of Education.

Degenne, A., M.Forse, H.Flap, and T.Snijders. 1998. Social Capital and its Measurement. Sunbelt XVIII and European International Conference on Social Networks, Sitges, Spain, May 1998.

Everett, M.G. and S.P. Borgatti. 1999. The centrality of groups and classes. J MATH SOCIOL, 23: (3) 181-201 1999.

Fitzgibbons, Athol. 1988. Keynes's vision : a new political economy. Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1988. (Adam Smith's System)

Flap, H.D. and N.D.de Graff. 1986. Social Capital and Attained Occupational Status. The Netherlands Journal of Sociology 22:145-61.

Frank, KA, and JY Yasumoto 1998. Linking action to social structure within a system: Social capital within and between subgroups. AMER J SOCIOL, 104: (3) 642-686 NOV 1998

Fukuyama, Francis. 1995. Trust.

Granovetter, Mark. 1974. Getting a Job.

Hanifan, L.J. 1920. The Community Center. Boston: Silver, Burdette and Co.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1969. Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. New York: Columbia.

Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Life and Death of American Cities.

Kadushin, Charles. 1981. Notes on expectations of reward in n-person groups. In Peter Blau and Robert Merton, eds., Continuities in Structural Inquiry. PP. 235-54.

Kennedy-BP Kawachi-I Brainerd-E (1998): 'The Role of Social Capital in the Russian Mortality Crisis'. World Development, Vol 26, Iss 11, pp 2029-2043

Lin, Nan. 1999. Sunbelt Keynote Address: Building a Network Theory of Social Capital. Connections 22(1):28-51.

Locke, EA. 1999. Some reservations about social capital. ACAD MANAGE REV, 24: (1) 8-9 JAN 1999

Loury, Glenn. 1977. A dynamic theory of racial income differences. IN P.A.Wallace and A.LeMund, Women, Minorities and Employment Discrimination. Chapter 8. Lexington, Mass.:Lexington Books.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. New York, E. P. Dutton & co. <1908>

Marshall, Alfred. 1890. Principles of Economics. London and New York, Macmillan and co., 1890. (organization as an agent of production)

Nahapiet, J., and S. Ghoshal. 1998. Social capital, intellectual capital and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review 23:242-266.

Pahl, R. E. 1984. Division of Labor. Oxford <Oxfordshire> ; New York, N.Y. : B. Blackwell, 1984.

Portes, Alejandro. 1996. The New Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Putnam, Robert D. 1995. Bowling alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy.

Putnam, Robert D. 1995. Tuning in, tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. PS: Political Science and Politics. December 1995:664-683.

Rose, Richard (1999): 'Getting things done in an anti-modern society: Social Capital Networks in Russia.' Social Capital. A Multifaceted Perspective. (Eds) P. Dasgupta, I. Serageldin. The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1999.

Schlicht, Ekkehart. 1984. Cognitive dissonance in economics. IN Normengeleitetes Verhalten in den Socialwissenschaften. Pp. 61-81. Berlin: Duncker Humbolt.

Smith, Adam. 1805. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London, Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805.

Snijders, Tom A. B. 1999. Prologue to the Measurement of Social Capital. The Tocqueville Review 1999 Vol. XX No.1:27-44.

Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin.

Stack, Carol. 1998. Holding Hands: An American Struggle for Community. IN Cultural Diversity in the South: Anthropological Contributions to a Region in Transition. Southern Anthropological Proceedings, No. 31. Edited by Carole E. Hill and Patricia D. Beaver. Athens: U. of Georgia Press. Pp. 93-103.

Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo D. and Sanford M. Dornbusch. 1995. Social capital and the reproduction of inequalilty: Information networks among Mexican-origin high school students. Sociology in Education 68:116-135.

Uzzi, Brian. 1999. Embededness in the Making of Financial Capital: How Social Relations and Networks Benefit Firms Seeking Financing. American Sociological Review 64:481-505

van Meter, Karl M. 1999. Social Capital Research Literature: Content Structure and the Comparative Contribution of Author Names. Connections 22(1):62-84.

Wellman, Barry, and Scot Wortley 1990. Different Strokes for Different Folks. AJS March, 1990, p.56

Wolfe, Alvin W., and Guy Hagen. 2002. Developing an Electronic Ethnography. In Michael V. Angrosino, ed., Doing Cultural Anthropology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. Pp. 139-149.