Social Capital

My company organised a presentation by the Harvard profesor Robert Putnam on the workings of social capital. If you click on the link, the information that is summarised is heaps better than anything I can write. My review here addresses what I saw as memorable sections of the speech.

• It is the connections we make with each other (this social capital) that adds value and productivity to our lives.
• Being socially disconnected equates to the same mortality rate as that of smoking.
• Social capital has to be based on physical networking. However, the key with technology is to work out how to utilise this technology we have now to better those networks.
• There are two types of social capital; bonding and bridging. Bonding capital is all about commonalities i.e. I would have a natural bonding capital with other asian male professionals in their mid-twenties. Bridging capital is the networks with have with people of different backgrounds, cultures, genders, age etc. A community must have both types for it to grow and succeed.

Bridging capital is obviously the harder one to create. So there are ways to increase the chances of this with groups.

1. Have lower barriers of entry i.e. make it easy to get in and get out
2. Have a cellular structure in your organisation, so that members will belong to small groups. People will feel the value in their small groups, and the aim of the leaders is to make sure all the small groups are heading the right direction.
3. Use common and less verbal activites to increase bridging e.g. arts, sports

It was a great talk. It's always good to get new perspectives on things. I'm keen on getting involved in a play now :)

Damn! three cheap calls already:

A play? Any excuse to perform in spandex pants right?

The article in your link is very interesting reading. It answers many questions, but poses more. Do we really trust our public authorities less now than in the past - do we today have a free voice to express it across mass media in a way not possible for previous generations?

Regardless, the data he provides is thought provoking. The physiological effects that intellectual stimulation and more notably human interaction provide are truly amazing.

Thanks for that post mate.
Taipan - 21 August '05 - 19:15

Interesting topic! I touched on Putnam and Bourdieu on Social capital last semester and yeah I passed! So what happens when there is a breakdown on Social Capital? If we are better off these days because as Putnam puts it that social capital adds value and productivity to our lives, why are we still finding less time but more work and pressure these days? and finding us spending less time with family and love ones?
lemon - 08 September '05 - 21:32

I think Putnam believes that the days around the end of 1960s were the good ones, and this correlates to the period of greatest "social capital" in terms of community involvement.

Now might be great productively, but pretty bad from a social capital perspective.
JookBoy (link) - 11 September '05 - 13:48