... Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s social capital is best represented as the grease or lubricant (norms and trust) which facilitates the flow of information, goods, or collective action (Fukuyama, 1996). In his comparative analysis of democracy in northern and southern Italy, Putnam emphasized the collective value of social capital to the community as a whole. Furthering Coleman’s work, Putnam defined social capital as the “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (Putnam, 1993, pp.167). “Social capital is thus a collectively held resource, such as generalized trust or norms of reciprocity, that provides benefits for the community” (Wetterberg, 2004, pp.3). In other words, social capital is the resource and the by-product is collective action (Farr, 2004). The quantity of social capital within a network, then, is a function of reciprocity expressed through norms and trust. These norms and trust, arising from regular, honest interaction, aid in forming new, additional connections.
From Social Capital, Resilience and the Local Church, Ayers.
The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all “social networks” [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [“norms of reciprocity”].
The term social capital emphasizes not just warm and cuddly feelings, but a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks. Social capital creates value for the people who are connected and – at least sometimes – for bystanders as well.
– Information flows (e.g. learning about jobs, learning about candidates running for office, exchanging ideas at college, etc.) depend on social capital.
– Norms of reciprocity (mutual aid) rely on social networks. Bonding networks that connect folks who are similar sustain particularized (in-group) reciprocity. Bridging networks that connect individuals who are diverse sustain generalized reciprocity.
– Collective action depends upon social networks (e.g., the role that the black church played in the Civil Rights movement) although collective action also can foster new networks.
– Broader identities and solidarity are encouraged by social networks that help translate an “I” mentality into a “we” mentality.
When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye on one another’s homes, that’s social capital in action. When a tightly knit community of Hassidic Jews trade diamonds without having to test each gem for purity, that’s social capital in action. Barn-raising on the frontier was social capital in action, and so too are e-mail exchanges among members of a cancer support group. Social capital can be found in friendship networks, neighborhoods, churches, schools, bridge clubs, civic associations, and even bars. The motto in Cheers “where everybody knows your name” captures one important aspect of social capital.
From Social Capital Primer, by Putnam>
From Mutual Aid & Social Capital: The Power of Communities, Networks. By Howard Rheingold
“[i]ndividuals inherit a capacity to learn and value algorithms that enhance their capacity to increase their own long-term benefits when confronting multiple social-dilemma situations with others who have learned and value similar norms, even though each situation involves different people, payoffs, and levels of uncertainty” (ibid., 44).
We will discuss the question of reciprocity and human nature in more detail later, but for the time being, it is important to emphasize that because reciprocity is learnt through processes of socialization, individuals can develop diverse strategies to deal with different social dilemmas. While some people learn strategies of reciprocity to overcome these problems in a variety of situations, others learn norms of behavior that are less “nice” (ibid.). This can include either individual or group egotistical behavior. In this sense, reciprocity norms can also have a dark side. In reference to this problematic finding, Ostrom argues:
“Tight circles of individuals who trust one another [and cooperate; LP] may discriminate against others of a different color, religion, or ethnicity to keep them from access to productive opportunities. The focus on the return of favors for favors can also be the foundation of corrupt practices whereby those in official positions do favors for wealthy friends who then return the favors with various forms of financial enrichments” (ibid.: 45).
For this reason, reciprocity norms and practices that are inclusive and that support basic moral standards must be differentiated from those that are highly exclusive, restrictive and repressive (ibid.).
According to Elinor Ostrom, central endogenous variables in human interactions that enable and strengthen reciprocal interactions are those of trust and reputation. She defines trust as “ that affects the first person’s choice, when an action must be taken before the actions of the others are known” (E. Ostrom 1998, 12). The existing level of trust is therefore central in determining the first action in a social dilemma because it “affects whether an individual is willing to initiate cooperation in the expectation that it will be reciprocated” (ibid.). The hope or expectation that one’s cooperation will be returned is not based on naïve altruism but rather on one’s own previous experiences and social norms, on the one hand, and on the reputation of the other person, on the other. Reputations are, in turn, important for trust and reciprocity because they give information about an individual’s history of overcoming social dilemmas. Or, in other words, reputations tell other people whether someone has been “keeping promises and performing actions with short-term costs but long-term benefits” (E. Ostrom 2003, 43). This, in turn, enables people to “estimate of the risk of extending trust [to the other person; LP], given the structure of the particular situation” (ibid., 49). A good reputation makes a person trustworthy, implicating that one can expect that they will reciprocate cooperative behavior in the future.
For this reason, Elinor Ostrom places the relationship between reciprocity, trust and reputation at the center of her understanding of how bounded rational agents overcome social dilemmas: “[A]t the core of a behavioral explanation are the links between the trust that an individual has in others, the investment others make in trustworthy reputations, and the probability of using reciprocity norms” (E. Ostrom 2003, 49-50). If cultivated, trust, reputations and reciprocity are “valuable assets” (E. Ostrom 1998, 12) that can create a “mutually reinforcing core” (E. Ostrom 2003, 50) and transform Hardin’s negative vicious cycle of tragedy into a virtuous cycle of improved joint outcomes, ultimately increasing one’s evolutionary (ibid., E. Ostrom 1998, 12). These insights into the mechanisms of reciprocity, trust and reputation to overcome social dilemmas are fundamental in Elinor Ostrom’s theoretical development of an alternative to market or state policy prescriptions that are grounded in micro-situational everyday experiences.
Despite these positive impacts on peoples’ capabilities to cooperate and trust one another, it must be emphasized that Elinor Ostrom’s research also reveals the contingency and fragility of these norms and behavioral patterns. For this reason, she shifts her focus from such endogenous variables to exogenous, contextual variables in order to understand how social conditions can strengthen these norms and enhance the possibilities of overcoming social dilemmas. By analyzing the effect of institutional structures on human interactions, it can be said that first-order dilemmas of reciprocity, trust and reputation are then transformed into second- and third-order public good dilemmas of institutional supply, credible commitment and mutual monitoring (E. Ostrom 2008a, 41-5). Similarly to her findings on trust and reciprocity, while the classical theory of fully rational agents predicts that rule making will not occur because everyone will default to free-riding,29 Ostrom’s meta-analysis of numerous laboratory and field experiments has discovered that people are actually often willing to invest time and energy into changing rules and institutions to improve joint outcomes.
Before analyzing and discussing these exogenous factors in detail, it should be mentioned that one specific variable can be considered fundamental for overcoming social dilemmas on all levels of interactions: The possibility of communicating with one another. Although no single variable automatically produces reciprocity norms, face-to- face communication is central for cultivating cooperation and creating institutions. In contrast to the situations of non-communication in Hardin’s unregulated commons and the prisoners’ dilemma, Elinor Ostrom explains:
“With a chance to see and talk with others repeatedly, a participant can assess whether he or she trusts others sufficiently to try to reach a simple contingent agreement regarding the level of joint effort and its allocation. Communication thus allows individuals to increase (or decrease) their trust in the reliability of others” (E. Ostrom 2003, 51).
Face-to-face communication not only enables people to access more information about other participants, but it also enables people to make promises and create agreements in relation to future actions. Furthermore, communication can reinforce prior normative values and facilitate the development of a group identity, which also generally increases mutual trust (ibid., 33). Thus, the possibility of face-to-face communication must be understood as a key variable in dealing with social dilemmas on different but interrelated levels of action. ...
Democracy, Markets and the Commons by L. Peter
At this point, however, we must confront a serious counterargument. Perhaps the traditional forms of civic organization whose decay we have been tracing have been replaced by vibrant new organizations. For example, national environmental organizations (like the Sierra Club) and feminist groups (like the National Organization for Women) grew rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s and now count hundreds of thousands of dues-paying members. An even more dramatic example is the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which grew exponentially from 400,000 card-carrying members in 1960 to 33 million in 1993, becoming (after the Catholic Church) the largest private organization in the world. The national administrators of these organizations are among the most feared lobbyists in Washington, in large part because of their massive mailing lists of presumably loyal members.
These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political importance. From the point of view of social connectedness, however, they are sufficiently different from classic "secondary associations" that we need to invent a new label--perhaps "tertiary associations." For the vast majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter. Few ever attend any meetings of such organizations, and most are unlikely ever (knowingly) to encounter any other member. The bond between any two members of the Sierra Club is less like the bond between any two members of a gardening club and more like the bond between any two Red Sox fans (or perhaps any two devoted Honda owners): they root for the same team and they share some of the same interests, but they are unaware of each other's existence. Their ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another. The theory of social capital argues that associational membership should, for example, increase social trust, but this prediction is much less straightforward with regard to membership in tertiary associations. From the point of view of social connectedness, the Environmental Defense Fund and a bowling league are just not in the same category.
From Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital, by Robert Putnam
[JONNY:] In the current moment, the nature of association, as political theorists like Anton Jäger have put it, is more “gaseous” and the expectation of affiliation to certain causes is much looser and cheaper. How do you think about the question of ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ for both individuals and organisations?
[PETE:] Zygmunt Bauman is one of my guides on this. He writes about ‘liquid modernity’, where he argues the world has become liquid: we don't become particularly connected to anything so we can adapt to any future circumstance, and our organisations aren't committed to us so that they can adapt to any future circumstance. The best book on this in the American context is Theda Skocpol's book Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003). We still have a civic life in America, but the groups representing civic life look very different than they did 75 years ago. Then, civic life was mass membership organisations where you were meeting in local chapters. In this context, to be a member of the organisation meant you met with other members, and it was literally embodied in your town through meetings. Those meetings federated up to become mass membership organisations through local chapters, regional chapters, state chapters, and eventually national chapters. Real local membership translated into national action.
But then, in the second half of the twentieth century, we traded mass membership for centralised management. We said, ‘Oh, all these local chapters, we don't really need them.’ We can just turn them into a mailing list, they can send us cheques, and that can pay our lobbyists in Washington, who can get a lot more done. We’re the experts in advocacy, and we can just send an annual report at the end of the year to our “membership” and tell them we've spent their cheques well. And maybe we can mobilise them once a year to vote in an election or write a letter to a congressman. But what happens is that the Sierra Club or the American Civil Liberties Union become something that you write a cheque to and are ‘managed’ by: they're trying to get you angry about the latest attack on your cause. So you write a $50 cheque so centralised actors can do more things. But the anger button eventually gets fried and the cheques don't even start coming anymore. The amount of mobilisation doesn't happen anymore. People get really cynical about politics. That, I think, is what you might be getting at with this idea of “gaseous organisations”.
Then with the internet, this is hypercharged with the fake mobilisation of liking a post or retweeting, or a quick donation drive where you can click a button. This makes everyone feel like they're doing all this action. But none of the congresspeople, the big corporations, or the big power players are actually scared because it doesn't add up to much. When you have a mass membership organisation, you can wield actual power. And so if we really want to build power again, we have to rejuvenate mass membership organisations.
...
[JONNY:] One seminal text on Atlantic communitarian history and its relationship to national social policy is Daniel T Roger’s 1998 Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. One of the real challenges it presents for civil society is how it can become overdivided along sectarian lines. For example, the main issue for the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not a lack of associations and societies, but their inability to build strong coalitions that can secure social policy at the national level.
In terms of contemporary communitarianism in the US, how much is this still a problem, and how can we potentially build stronger coalitions?
[PETE:] This is a very important question. One of the most evil clubs in American history – the Ku Klux Klan – terrorised communities for a century, and they peaked at the times when we had the most active civic life. We do not only need clubs that bond us to people that are similar to us; we need clubs that bridge us across divides. We need to be thinking about where there are points of segregation in a society and think about what clubs and institutions can bridge those.
In America, for example, the military has done a lot of work in bridging across divides. It takes people from all across the country, across all races, and actually helps bridge some divides. Religion has been a way that has bridged some economic divides, too. And so we need to think about that when there are divides across generations, race, class, and political belief. We need to think about strengthening those institutions and clubs that bridge divides in society. That's easier said than done, but the work is very important.
In terms of building a national coalition, a bunch of nice little civic clubs in all the towns does not make a national programme. Just because you have rotary clubs everywhere does not mean you're going to translate that into national power. That is where coalitions come into play. And the way I just see this, structurally, is that communities are the base level of organising – they're the tiny building blocks that bring people together in the first place. That right now, as we've been talking about, is very weak. And so what we need to do is to cultivate all these little communities to just get us from a totally individualist society to having any collective sense of community at all. But community is not enough.
We also need coalitions: collections of communities that come together to secure change at the national level. And there are three entities that do this. One is federated organisations. As Skocpol discusses, we need more than just a bunch of ad hoc civic groups in every town. We need organisations that federate us into state and national and international projects so that they can act at those different scales.
The second type of group that brings people together is social movements. We need to put together social movements that a lot of different communities can read themselves in. And there is an art and a craft to building these social movements. The environmental movement needs to bring together a bunch of different people if they want to fight climate change at the international level.
The third, which I think is the most ignored in America today, is the political party. The political party is the concrete manifestation of a bunch of people coming together to try to build a majority, in order to advance their vision. A recent book – Hollow Parties – went viral in political science circles because we have such a centralised management culture and such a weakened local chapter culture within political party structures. Now, the political party is just whoever the candidate is on TV.
[JONNY:] With growing concerns about social disconnection, many commentators describe a “loneliness epidemic” or even a broader “crisis of belonging.” You’ve suggested, however, that this emphasis on belonging might actually be missing a deeper issue — what you call a “crisis of membership.” Could you explain what you mean by this deeper problem, and why you see membership as so vital in addressing these challenges?
[PETE:] This is what you could call ‘individualist communitarianism’: we're in such an individualist time that we process everything through an individualist lens, and therefore, even the alternative to hyper-individualism needs to be processed through an individualist lens. Of course, in Join or Die, we make a lot of arguments that joining a club is good for you as an individual. You have to start the conversation somewhere. But the idea of belonging could be defined as an individual feeling of being part of something, a feeling of being accepted into a larger world. We want a world where more people feel like they belong. But what we like about the phrase ‘membership’ is that it gets at the larger structure that includes the individual, but is also beyond it. So it is not just about the individual feeling in that person, even though it is one of the byproducts of membership.
Membership is the relationship between the person, the larger community, and the institutions. When you're a member of something, it's not just that you feel a part of it; you take responsibility for it. You are responsible for knowing its past and stewarding its present and co-creating its future. You are no longer a consumer or a client or a constituent of the broader world. You are a collaborator, a citizen, a caretaker of it. You need to actively participate in something to be a member of it, but it is also about what it needs to do for you. So the world needs to be reconstructed in a way that it opens itself up and invites participation.
There was a lot of writing in the mid-twentieth century about the fear that the world was moving in a direction that leaves the individual outside all of these big entities. They're all in a black box and we don't really know what’s going on; they control us, but we don't really know how they're made. But membership culture is about blurring the lines between the inside and the outside by inviting people to participate in the world. It also blurs political distinctions because, in one sense, I may sound like a conservative when I say it's about you taking responsibility for the world around you, but then I'm sounding like a leftist when I'm saying it's about you co-creating the world and reconstructing it into what you believe it should be.
From Contemporary Communitarianism: An Interview with Pete Davis
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