Social Capital Framework Research Articles

The importance of effective organisational relationships for nurses: a social capital perspective

This study used a social capital theoretical framework to explain how the quality of relationships (that develop between nurses and their supervisors) affect individual and organisational outcomes. The findings make a contribution to the field of public sector organisational behaviour by identifying how the quality of relationships between employees and management not only affects the employees themselves, but also affects longer term organisational effectiveness by affecting productivity and turnover rates. Whilst previous research has identified the importance of building social capital within private sector organisations; these findings suggest that it is as important for public sector organisations to invest in developing effective relationships so as to improve organisational effectiveness. Many of the changes resulting from the implementation of NPM improved the efficiency of processes; however, the same measures appear to have negatively impacted on the quality of organisational relationships for nurses. The implication of the findings for senior hospital management interested in ensuring longer term organisational effectiveness is that nurses' satisfaction with supervisor communication is a powerful ingredient within the social capital equation. This is because it moderates part of nurses' perception of other organisational factors, which in turn, affect approximately a third of their job satisfaction (and therefore productivity) and job commitment (and therefore absenteeism and turnover).

The Utility of Social Capital and Collective Efficacy: Social Control Policy in Nonmetropolitan Settings

Researchers and practitioners have made great strides at implementing crime reduction and prevention policies in urban areas; however, such policies are largely absent in less densely populated nonmetropolitan settings. This article provides a review of major findings from two recent nonmetropolitan studies using survey data from 1,125 citizens nested in 31 nonmetropolitan residential units (RUs) located in the state of Michigan. Hierarchical linear modeling results provide empirical evidence that the differential ability of nonmetropolitan Michigan residents to realize mutual trust and solidarity (i.e., social cohesion) is a major source of RU variation in citizens’ perceived incivility and burglary. Toward this end, several policy recommendations are endorsed in nonmetropolitan communities, whereby resources of social capital can help facilitate collective efficacy for the purpose of social control and improvement of citizen quality of life. Using a social capital framework is likely to benefit rural researchers and policy makers alike.

Changing the Culture of Aging: A Social Capital Framework for Gerontology

This article seeks to provide an alternative to the “problem” approach that dominates gerontological research in many countries. In this article I propose a conceptual framework for examining the social value that older adults provide society by exploring and expanding upon social capital literature. The theoretical underpinnings of social capital are reviewed, exploring the essential components of social capital as a tool for examining the creation of social value. Gerontological frameworks that contribute to increased awareness of the positive aspects of aging are examined. These two approaches are linked using a social capital framework for studying aging, presented here as a new orientation to aging and as a step toward a change in the current culture of aging and aging research.

Social Capital, Networks, and Knowledge Transfer

We examine how social capital dimensions of networks affect the transfer of knowledge between network members. We distinguish among three common network types: intracorporate networks, strategic alliances, and industrial districts. Using a social capital framework, we identify structural, cognitive, and relational dimensions for the three network types. We then link these social capital dimensions to the conditions that facilitate knowledge transfer. In doing so, we propose a set of conditions that promote knowledge transfer for the different network types.

Documents and debatesSocial exclusion, sure start and organizational social capital: evaluating inter‐disciplinary multi‐agency working in an education and health work programme

Social policy‐making in the UK under the Labour government has galvanized around the issue of social exclusion, identifying young children (0–4 years) and their families living in areas of high social disadvantage to be particularly at risk. This paper attempts to recover the experiences and views of professionals concerned with the delivery and implementation of a multi‐agency programme tackling the social exclusion of these young children and their families known as Sure Start. The data are based on the analysis of documentation, attendance and observation at meetings, and 32 semi‐structured interviews with members of the inter‐disciplinary team responsible for the Sure Start programme's delivery. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using open coding from grounded theorizing. The paper, in reflecting on the problems and dilemmas of multi‐agency approaches and reported in other research, considers how the preliminary findings from this study suggest the team have managed to accommodate and overcome these potential difficulties, to facilitate an integrated, holistic and user‐centred approach to the programme. The paper concludes by considering the possibility that the team's approach may be conceptually located within an organizational social capital framework as posited by Nahapiet and Ghoshal.

Social Capital: Building an Effective Learning Environment in Marketing Classes

Marketing educators have responded to trends affecting marketing education by expanding the emphasis in marketing education to helping students develop new skills and capabilities. Achieving these new educational objectives requires more of a focus on a learning-oriented perspective toward marketing education. The success of a learning-oriented educational perspective depends upon the creation of an effective learning environment in marketing classes. Building social capital is suggested as a way to create an effective learning environment. A Social Capital Framework for Marketing Classes is presented and used to identify ways to increase the Social Capital Bank Account in a class and produce an effective learning environment.

Investing in Communities: Social Capital's Role in Keeping Youth in School

Many community leaders view economic development as the primary strategy for improving social well-being. One approach to economic development is enhancing the local labor force's human capital through formal education. In this article, we use a social capital framework to analyze how local institutions, specifically families and schools, affect educational achievement among public school students. We explore how social capital in the broader community context mediates the effects of family and school social capital on keeping students in school. Using hierarchical linear models to estimate these contributions, the results reaffirm the vital role of family social capital. They also show that attributes of school and community social capital make important contributions to staying in school. Our results suggest strategies that community development practitioners and local leaders can use to enhance educational outcomes and, in turn, the economic vitality of communities.

Social capital and premarital sexual activity in Africa: the case of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Prior research has pointed to several factors that may affect sexual behavior in Africa, but much of the work has been atheoretical or descriptive, thus reducing the explanatory value of some findings. In this study, the influence of individual characteristics and family background were examined in a sample of 2,000 women aged 14-24 interviewed in Kinshasa in 1995. The analysis was guided by the social capital framework and the discussion focused on three theoretical perspectives: rational adaptation, social disorganization, and patrilineal bias. The results from the event history analysis showed that poverty, exposure to mass media, patrilinearity, and AIDS awareness greatly reduce the risk of premarital sexual activity. In contrast, social capital, as measured by the number of siblings, was positively associated with sexual permissiveness, suggesting a dilution of adults' attention to children in larger families.

Social Capital and Risk Level of Posttreatment Drug Use: Implications for Harm Reduction among Male Treated Addicts in Hong Kong

Since relapse is common among treated addicts, harm reduction efforts should be made to minimize their levels of risk in their reuse of drugs. This paper applies the social capital framework to analyze how a treated addict's social network affects the risk level of posttreatment drug use. Embeddedness in a pro-social network reestablished by a treated addict can facilitate positive social capital in the forms of tutelage of a normal life, informal social control from nondrug-using people, and lessening of perceived public discrimination. On the contrary, reentering a network of active addicts can produce negative social capital in the forms of tutelage of the addict lifestyle, lack of informal social control from nondrug-using people, and reinforcement of perceived public discrimination. The possession of positive social capital greatly enhances the treated addict's likelihood to reduce the risk level of posttreatment drug use, whereas the possession of negative social capital reduces such likelihood. Data used in this paper were extracted from a study of 200 male former clients of a voluntary residential treatment agency in Hong Kong. Implications of the findings for helping male treated addicts to generate positive social capital as a posttreatment harm reduction measure are discussed.

Social Capital and Community Strategies: Neighbourhood Development in Guatemala City

This article uses a social capital framework to analyse the strategies employed by two low–income communities in Guatemala City to improve their physical and social environment. The case studies provide examples of poor communities, without access to any form of insurance or welfare benefits, struggling to achieve neighbourhood development. They also demonstrate the way in which strategies can be defined by the issue of land tenure. Key strategies for development were found to be mobilization through community organization, informal links (including clientelistic relations) with powerful groups, and protest. The author concludes that social capital (within communities and between stakeholders) and some degree of security (land tenure) are critical ingredients for communities to develop effective strategies for neighbourhood development with other stakeholders.

Use of the social capital framework for assessment of a training and education program for people working with crime victims

Social capital theory provided a framework for assessing the impact of participation in the Michigan Victim Assistance Academy (MVAA), an intensive university based education program for people whose job includes assisting crime victims. The MVAA was designed to, among other things, increase participants’ social capital as reflected by quality of relationships and network building. The model used to assess the MVAA links participation in the MVAA to increased social capital and improvements in both individual victim service (IVS) and coordinated community response (CCR) outcomes. Data were collected with in‐depth telephone interviews with academy graduates. Empirically supported relationships for a sample of primarily white female participants confirm a Revised MVAA Model. Findings show that the majority of study participants did increase their social capital by forming new relationships and improving existing relationships, and that this increase translated into positive IVS and/or CCR outcomes. Furthermore, the presence or absence of workplace or community barriers or resources did not greatly impact the participants’ ability to translate social capital into desired outcomes. That is, participants were able to draw upon their social capital to improve victim service regardless of their work or community environment. Implications for future university based victim service provider educational programs are discussed.

Space Matters! Spatial Inequality in Future Sociology

ANN R. TICKAMYER Ohio University Its Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth. Annals 530: 74-96. Sears, David. 1988. ''Symbolic Racism. Chapter 4 in Eliminating Racism: Profiles in CorLtroversy, edited by Phyllis A. Katz and Dalmas A. Taylor. New York: Plenum Press. Solorzano, Daniel and O. Villalpando. 1998. Critical Race Theory, Marginality, and the Experience of Minority Students in Higher Education. Pp. 2 11-224 in Emerging Issues in the Sociology of Education: Comparative Perspectives, edited by C. Torres and T. Mitchell. Albany: State University of New York Press. Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo D. 1997. Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youth. Harvard Educational Review 67: 1H0 Takaki, Ronald. 1990. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 1 9th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Takezawa, Yasuko I. 1995. Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Thernstrom, Stephan and Abigail M. Thernstrom. 1997. America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. New York: Simon & Schuster. Thompson, Becky W. 1994. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Mia. 1998. Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? Asian Experience Today. New Brunswick, N]: Rutgers University Press. Vigil, James Diego. 1998. From Indians to Chicanos: Dynamics of Mexican-American Culture. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Waldinger, Roger and Thomas Bailey. 1991. The Continuing Significance of Race: Racial Conflict and Racial Discrimination in Construction. Politics and Society 19: 291-323. Waters, Mary C. 1994. Ethnic and Racial Identities of Second-Generation Black Immigrants in New York City. International Migration Review 28795-820. Wilson, William Julius. 1980. Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. 2d Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1987. Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1996. When Work Disappears: World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Woo, Deborah. 1985. The Socioeconomic Status of Asian American Women in the Labor Force: An Alternative View. Sociological Perspectives 28: 307-38. Xu, Wu and Ann Leffler. 1992. and Race Effects on Occupational Prestige, Segregation, and Earnings. Gender S Society 6: 376-401. Zhou, Min. 1992. Chinatown: Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Zia, Helen. 2000. Asian Americans Dreams: Emergence of an American People. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

10.1079/ARC200510

Recent research on the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) has demonstrated that social capital has an important role to play in how fisheries are managed and, more importantly, how conflicts are dealt with. The present paper examines the management of fisheries conflicts through a social capital lens; and reviews the importance of the development of social capital by natural resource managers and policy makers in their bid to increase community participation in natural resource management. The paper de-bunks; the myth that island communities have high levels of co-operation and social cohesion. Using a structural/cognitive social capital analytical framework, it concludes that while structural or institutional social capital is high, cognitive or relational social capital is low. Failure to tackle the mismatch between structural and cognitive social capital is likely to lead to serious natural resource problems in the future and will ultimately inhibit collective action. It recommends that social capital be used as an entry point for future work that requires the involvement of the community but where there is no prior history of co-operation.

The Everyday Maker: A New Challenge to Democratic Governance

A powerful feature of Putnam’s social capital framework is the attention it directs towards a critical question for democracies: How is democratic civic engagement created, sustained and expanded (cf Levi, 1996, p. 52) However, Putnam’s investigation into this problem neglects considerations concerning the consequences of the ongoing transition of democratic government into democratic governance. As a result, his evaluation of the state of affairs of Western democracy becomes more gloomy than need be. A study of democratic governance and civic engagement in Denmark draws the contours of a new political identity, the Everyday Maker. The Everyday Maker represents a new form of political engagement, which attempts to combine individuality and commonality in new relations of self-and co-governance. Seen from Putnam’s government perspective there is a serious risk that the researcher comes to ignore the political potential of the Everyday Makers and see them as nothing but individuals “bowling alone.”

Waiting Until They Leave Home

This study examines the experiences of young adults whose parents separated when they were 18 years or older, and uses the conceptual framework of Family Social Capital for interpretation. Family support, parent-child relationships, family fragility, inverted parenting, and kin keeping were significant factors for this group. They reported low levels of support, a sense throughout childhood of family vulnerability, and demands for parenting parents and kin keeping after their parents separated. Father-son relationships often improved after parental separation. The chronicity of family unhappiness for this group is compared with the experiences of offspring whose parents separated when they were children.

Social Capital and Political Culture

Among the most successful recent efforts at political engagement among low-income Americans have been those led by church-based community organizations (CCOs). This article discusses the strengths and limitations of Putnam's social capital framework for understanding the CCO success. A brief case study of community organizing among low-income, ethnically diverse residents of Oakland, California, shows how participants build a culture of political engagement. Three years of participant observation in Oakland and 65 interviews there and in 5 other U.S. cities generated the primary data. The article argues that social capital, as conceptualized by Putnam, contributes substantially toward explaining how CCOs project power into the political arena. However, understanding the success requires broader insight into political capacity. Attention must be paid to a “second face of culture”: shared values, symbol systems, and assumptions about the world. Here, political and religious culture cannot be reduced to social capital.

A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youths

In this article, Ricardo Stanton-Salzar offers a network-analytic framework for understanding the socialization and schooling experiences of working-class racial minority youth. Unlike many previous writers who have examined the role of "significant others," he examines the role that relationships between youth and institutional agents, such as teachers and counselors, play in the greater multicultural context in which working-class minority youth must negotiate. Stanton-Salazar provides the conceptual foundations of a framework built around the concepts of social capital and institutional support. He concentrates on illuminating those institutional and ideological forces that he believes make access to social capital and institutional support within schools and other institutional settings so problematic for working-class minority children and adolescents. Stanton-Salazar also provides some clues as to how some working-class minority youth are able to manage their difficult participation in multiple worlds, how they develop cultural strategies for overcoming various obstacles, and how they manage to develop sustaining and supportive relationships with institutional agents.

The Impact of Parents' Marital Status on the Time Adolescents Spend in Productive Activities

Time-diary data from single-mother and two-parent families are utilized to examine differences in how adolescents use productive time in three domains: housework, school work, and paid employment Multivariate analyses reveal suggestive evidence that living in a single parent family increases adolescent girls' employment time and decreases adolescent boys' school time relative to girls and boys living in two parent families. The adolescent's age and the mother's education and employment status appear to be more important influences on time allocation than is family structure. The amount of debate regarding how family structure affects children's welfare has increased markedly as the number of children living in divorced and never-married families has risen. Much of the scholarly research in this area (reviewed in Demo & Acock, 1991) has focused on the negative effects of divorce on children's social, psychological, and academic outcomes. For example, in their recent longitudinal study, Haveman and Wolfe (1994) found an inverse relationship between the number of years a minor child lives in a single-parent household and the child's educational attainment. Explanations for the observed associations between family structure and various childhood outcomes sometimes allude to differences in children's timeuse patterns as an intermediate factor. The conventional wisdom is that children in single-parent households have less parental supervision than their counterparts in two-parent households. Indeed, several studies (reviewed in McLanahan & Booth, 1991) have found that single parents are less involved in monitoring their children's social and school activities than their two-parent counterparts. Less parental supervision may lead these children to spend less time in school work. At the same time, children in single-parent families may feel greater pressure to do housework to help the parent better balance work and family responsibilities. These children also may want to do more paid work so that they can acquire the consumer goods that their more affluent peers in two-parent households have. Wallerstein and Blakeslee (1990) go so far as to suggest that a shift away from leisure activities for children whose parents have divorced, coupled with the psychological stress of the divorce, may mean the end of a care-free childhood for many of these children. The theory of social capital developed by Coleman (1990) can be used to formalize this conventional wisdom and generate testable hypotheses about the impact that marital status has on adolescents' time use. Coleman argues that individuals provide resources to other individuals in various forms that include obligations, expectations, information, norms, sanctions, authority, and organizational structures. These social relationships that can be used by an individual to facilitate his/her self-interest are termed social capital. Within the context of the family, social capital is hypothesized to influence adolescents' human capital acquisition and, consequently, the time they allocate to various productive activities. Specifically, when a mother and father are both present in the home, there is the opportunity for more parental supervision and communication with a teenager regarding expected time use (e.g., reinforcement of setting aside time to do homework) compared to singleparent households. If parents in two-parent families take advantage of these additional opportunities to bolster positive activities and discourage less fruitful uses of time, then adolescents' time allocation is likely to vary across these two family types. The limited research that has made use of the social capital framework (Asmussen & Larson, 1991; Haveman & Wolfe, 1994) has found that the absence of a parent alters the mix of children's time spent with family members and their early adulthood outcomes. Both of these findings are consistent with our hypotheses. Although assessing the influence of family structure is the primary focus of the current analysis, other available indicators of the family's social capital will also be examined. …