Social Capital And Civic Engagement Summary

Social Capital and Civic Engagement

In James Coleman’s and Robert Putnam’s opinions, great social capital is the premise of achievement of every benefit. But although their studies all emphasize the great role social capital plays in every aspect of social structure, the American population still have faced an eroding social capital in the past decades. As a result, they also lost “the ties that bind us to communities and neighborhood”(McPherson, p4). Generally, where there is declining social capital, there is worsening social isolation. However, new studies have had contradicted findings toward the previous researches. According to Rankin and Quane’s experiment in ghetto community, people still have active civic engagement with low social

They are the elementary factors to determine how valuable the social capital is. In common situations, the less isolated people are to the social activities, the more the social capital must be. Robert Putnam mentioned that during the last two to three decades, civic engagement and social connectedness have been diminishing in America. Putnam concluded four main reasons that might cause the diminishing. Firstly, for the last two to three decades, more and more women moved from full-time housekeepers to paid employment. It is believed to be a social revolution that significantly reduced the cost which had to be paid to build social capital. Secondly, previous studies indicated that residential stability was positively associated with civic engagement. If the mobility of an individual becomes higher, it means that he/she may have a lower residential stability. With the development of urbanization and automobile, individuals have more opportunities to move everywhere. It implies a higher mobility and a lower civic engagement. Next to this, some demographic transformations such as fewer marriages, more divorces and fewer children may lead to a lower civic engagement. Lastly, the technological transformation of leisure also impacts deeply on people’s lifestyle. From televisions to internet, more and more families prefer staying at home by themselves rather than going outside. From Putnam’s work, all

They found out that in poorer neighborhoods, there are in fact higher levels of participation in community organizing than in less impoverished neighborhoods. During the research process, they examined the “relative importance of neighborhood poverty and individual and family characteristics on social-network composition and community organizational participation of inner-city Chicago African American families”(Rankin and Quane, p4). The result is totally contradicted against Putnam’s discover, for under the appearance of people’s high engagement in community works lies a poor social capital. Erosion of social network don’t lead to extreme social