A dialectic perspective on the interactive relationship between social media and civic participation: the moderating role of social capital

By analyzing representative national survey data, this study explores the ways in which social media and social capital jointly affect civic participation. In particular, the study examines how the use of social media to express opinions or acquire trusted information influence citizens participatory activities in civic affairs. Our findings suggest that both social media use and social capital promote civic activities. Interestingly, this study reveals that social media exert differential effects on civic participation, depending on the individual's level of social capital, rather than having an equal impact on civic participation. The study offers a new perspective from which to examine the relationships between social media, social capital, and civic participation. The results and implications are discussed in detail below.     

Who bears the burden of bribery? Evidence from public service delivery in Kenya

This article empirically examines how an individual's economic, social and political capital affects their propensity to make bribe payments in exchange for public services. Using an individual‐level survey on bribes, the econometric results suggest that the burden of bribery is borne by the poor, but substantially decreases when institutions that constrain bureaucratic corruption are strong and effective. The results also show that the incidence of bribery decreases when social capital is high but increases when political networks are prevalent. These findings support the need to combine anti‐corruption reforms with poverty reduction strategies and social policies in order to foster equity in public services provision in Kenya.     

Off‐farm Work among Rural Households: A Case Study in the Brazilian Amazon

This article analyzes off‐farm work among subsistence‐level farmers in the Santarém region of the Brazilian Amazon. We build on the literature on rural livelihoods in the Global South by exploring how the opportunity to work off the farm is embedded in social relationships. We additionally differentiate our analysis by type of off‐farm work, and examine how other characteristics such as human capital, the available labor supply, and access to infrastructure vary by work outcome. In general, the factors that contribute to more secure, relatively higher‐paying work differ from those important in understanding patterns of lower‐paying, daily wage work. We find that on‐farm social capital, measured as the presence of a co‐resident on the property who works off the farm, increases an individual's probability of working off the farm, but has a stronger effect for lower‐wage work. We also find that the farm owner's relationship to households on the farm property plays a significant role in predicting patterns of off‐farm work. These findings suggest that social capital plays an important role in providing access to employment and therefore to cash income, but that farm‐level social capital does not necessarily provide pathways to stable or high‐paying jobs outside agriculture.     

Jazz in Social Interaction: Personal Creativity,Collective Constraint,and Motivational Explanation in the Social Thought of Howard S. Becker

Although symbolic interactionist studies are often thought to abandon motivational explanation in favor of a focus on social process, the interactionist tradition has usefully employed two deterministic themes. One is inherent in the appreciation of the actor's inescapable sense of interactional significance for behavior that will be socially witnessed. A second deterministic theme appreciates external constraints on the individual's perception and generation of social acts. The former shapes all work in symbolic interactionism. The latter has been developed most consistently in the work of Howard S. Becker. Without addressing the matter as such, Becker has worked with a series of ideas about constraint on individual motivation, ideas that are harmonious with the interactionist's understanding of personal creativity in social action. His writings invite a reconsideration of the supposed antagonism between the appreciation of interactive process and the understanding of motivational constraint. Becker's work on motivation is also notable for outlining a theory of increasing constraints through the life cycle, constraints which, if appreciated by the actor, carry paradoxically liberating implications. The distinctive interplay of personal creativity and collective constraint in his thought is succinctly captured by the metaphor of jazz in social interaction.     

EVALUATING CHANGES IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF CAPITAL WEALTH

A small-scale general equilibrium model in which the distribution of capital wealth is a key parameter is employed to examine the potential economic consequences of greater capital wealth equality. Every performance indicator examined – aggregate income, consumption equality, social welfare in the sum-of-utilities sense, and aggregate saving –is improved by greater capital wealth equality. However, the bottom-line social welfare gain, relative to the present high-inequality situation – even from the maximum achievable level of complete equality in capital wealth distribution – would be numerically rather modest.     

Perspective-taking and memory capacity predict social network size

Human social networks typically consist of a hierarchically organized series of grouping levels. There is, however, considerable variation between individuals in the sizes of any given network layer. We test between two possible factors (memory capacity and theory of mind) that might limit the size of two different levels within human social networks (support cliques and sympathy groups). We show that the size of an individual's support clique (the number of individual's in the innermost circle of friends) is better explained by individual differences in social cognition (mentalising skills). However, the size of the sympathy group (the most frequent social partners) is better explained by individual's performance on memory tasks.     

A Social Capital Basis for Environmental Concern: Evidence from Northern New England*

This study, based on a random‐digit‐dialing telephone survey of adults in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, uses ordinary least squares regression to examine a relatively neglected element in the sociological literature on environmental concern, namely, the influence of an individual's social capital on the formation of environmental attitudes. We argue that it is those individuals with a greater diversity of social connections who are most likely to be influenced by ecological perspectives grounded in conservation and environmental protection. Controlling for other theoretically relevant variables, we regress an index of environmental concern that gives special emphasis to environmental‐economic trade‐offs on our measures of relational and community social capital. While confirming much of the earlier work in this area, our model provides evidence that connections to other people play an important role in determining individual concern for the environment. Specifically, the number of respondents' “weak ties”—that is, not their closest relationships—and the average occupational status of respondents' social ties, in general, were both positively correlated with environmental concern. Additionally, one of our three measures of community social capital, the number of visits from friends over the past month, was statistically significant and negatively correlated with environmental concern.     

Social capital, networks and leisure consumption

This article reflects on the way in which personal ties affect the nature and content of consumption. While it is banal to observe that friends, kin, colleagues and neighbours influence anyone's pattern of consumption, comparatively little work exists on how this process operates. The article will be illustrated by some secondary analysis of the British Household Panel Survey which has a panel of approximately 10,000 people who have been interviewed annually since 1991. It analyses aspects of individual consumption in relation to people's associational involvement and friendship ties. The data is explored in the context of debates about social capital, attempting to apply the concept in order to analyse recreational practices. It is suggested that social capital is a flawed concept and that greater appreciation of the complexity and diversity of network ties is required to understand how personal connections influence consumption.     

Piketty's Calibration Economics: Inequality and the Dissolution of Solutions?

Abstract

By popularising interest in inequality, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a significant contribution. It has helped to change the basic terms of debate regarding wealth and income. However, Capital exhibits several weaknesses. The overall statement of Piketty's 3 laws tends to confuse the reader by conflating capital with all forms of wealth, and capital with the current market valuation of wealth assets. The whole creates a form of empiricism by metrics or calibration. The aggregation also lends itself to data as history rather than as historically grounded explanation of evidence. Concomitantly, it lacks a theorisation of capitalism, of power, of the state, of social movements, and of social transformations. This affects the way in which possible solutions to inequality are conceived. However, it does provoke further grounds for ethical counterargument productive of more progressive solutions to the problems it highlights.     

Models of Family Structure and Functioning

Professional change-agents who are concerned with modifying individual behaviour are increasingly aware of the impact of the family in inducing and maintaining personality disorders. As far as the individual's mental health is concerned, the family is the critical social context which fosters personal growth or produces disturbed behaviour. Consequently, professional attention is moving from the study and treatment of individuals in isolation to a new emphasis on work with whole families.     

Transnational class formation and spatialities of power: the case of elite competition in Bolivia

In this article, I argue that the neoliberal and counter‐neoliberal transitions in Bolivia secured the power of transnational capital within the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bolivia's mining elite used neoliberal strategies to undermine the interests of the country's agricultural elite and pursued a marriage of convenience with transnational capital that allowed both to enter state‐monopolized spaces of investment in mutually beneficial ways. In Bolivia's counter‐neoliberal turn, leftist social movements and political parties removed the elite from power but were dependent on transnational firms to help them use the country's natural resource wealth to fund programmes of socioeconomic change. Engaging theories of the transnational class formation, I assert that scholars need to acknowledge how different capitalist class fractions have distinct spatialities of power. In particular, it is necessary to distinguish between global elites that participate in local circuits of accumulation and local elites that participate in global circuits of accumulation.     

Social capital and child welfare

Social and economic inequalities have risen steeply in the UK over the past 20 years. Children and their families have been particularly disadvantaged by this creeping impoverishment, which is associated with negative effects on parenting capacity and developmental outcomes for children. The social capital of communities, which consists of the cultural resources and inter‐personal relationships between members, is also eroded by inequality and social exclusion. Evidence is presented that demonstrates the way in which children's welfare and family functioning are crucially dependent upon the social support available within local communities. It is argued that building social capital in poor communities is a more effective way of promoting children's welfare than the present emphasis on formal child protection and family support services and efforts to increase parenting skills and responsibilities. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social Capital,Organic Agriculture,and Sustainable Livelihood Security: Rethinking Agrarian Change in Mexico*

Abstract This paper explores the relevance of extra local market linkages and local‐level social capital to sustainable livelihood outcomes in two agrarian communities on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. Contextualized by the specificity of Mexico's transition from state‐directed rural development to neoliberally‐guided rural development in the 1990s, findings suggest that market linkages can intersect with pre‐existing social capital to both create new and destroy preexisting social capital, thus shaping the direction of development and inequality outcomes. The nature of a community's social fabric is often a result of long‐standing historical legacies. In the communities presented, the quantity and quality of social capital was intricately connected to their history of state‐sponsored or market agriculture; the nature of local institutions, with particular emphasis on the formation and evolution of the ejido; and the access to and availability of natural resources, namely land and water, which are both intricately connected to market access options. Moving beyond a simple demonstration that social capital matters, this analysis explores the complex and dynamic interaction between local‐level social capital and extralocal market linkages. In doing so, it contributes to the larger debate on how the historical legacy of populist reforms and the social and political institutions created during state populism have nuanced the trajectory of neoliberal development in Mexico.     

Gender, home and family in cultural capital theory

The paper argues that Bourdieu's stress on early familiarization for the highest value of cultural capital is closely linked to his idea, strongly emphasized in Distinction, about the role of family and domestic life for individual development and social positions. The role of women, as mothers and homemakers, is crucial in this process. Yet, Bourdieu defines social origin as deriving from the father. The centrality to Bourdieu's thinking of a resilient traditional pattern of masculine domination and feminine submission constitutive of the Western gender habitus explains both his stress on ‘normalcy’ for the production of legitimate dispositions, and his resistance to incorporating into his thinking the implications of recent transformations in home family living, which have destabilized the gender order. It is thus important to consider contemporary feminist analyses of the family and home life and their significance for a renewed theory of cultural capital. The paper considers two sets of literature. Firstly, it addresses the manners in which home and family are conceptualized in Bourdieu's key texts where these issues were prominent in the development of his thinking on cultural capital. The second set of literature includes texts by feminist academics in the fields of family, gender and the body, which analyse the destabilizing of the gender order and everyday family living in contemporary society. Two questions are addressed on the basis of these reflections: (1) Is cultural capital an individual or a household resource? (2) How does cultural capital relate to personal interdependencies at the level of family and households?     

Social Resources and Occupational Status Attainment: Comparison of Japanese and American Employees' Personal Networks

Abstract: The present study compares Japan and the USA in the ways in which individuals’ personal relationships affect the social standing they achieve. The conceptual framework applied here is similar to that used in established research in Western countries, which examines the effects of both human capital and social capital. The analyses are based on the data collected from a random sample of adult residents in Tokyo, which contains information about their personal networks. This data set is compared with the social network module of the 1985 General Social Survey in the United States. The analyses supported both human capital and social capital theories in the process of status attainment in both countries. Human capital, however, seems to have a stronger influence especially in the USA sample, because certain structural characteristics are associated with one's own educational achievement, which in turn are instrumental in attaining social capital. Unlike the USA, however, the access to social capital in Japan was found primarily through homophily, showing little effect based upon the type of networks they have. The results suggest the difference between the two countries in terms of the function of social resources and the strength of ties that are instrumental in the process of status attainment.     

Career Counseling Is a Personal Matter

In this article we argue that career counseling with adults is the exploration of personal identity and meaning, both of which are fundamental to an individual's survival, well-being, and family life-style.     

Community Economic Development Strategies in Rural Washington: Toward a Synthesis of Natural and Social Capital*

Abstract Routes to economic development attract considerable attention in community and rural sociology. Social scientists draw increasingly on studies of social capital and environmental surroundings as they examine the factors that facilitate and inhibit economic development. However, few empirical analyses exist that analyze the impact of the combination of social infrastructure and natural capital on different forms of economic development such as on industrial recruitment and self‐development. Using data collected from six communities in Washington State, the interaction of a community's social infrastructure and natural capital on industrial recruitment and self‐development efforts is examined. Results suggest that while natural capital positively impacts a community's successful recruitment of outside industries, it is not significant for a community's level of self‐development. However, a community's social infrastructure, measured by the existence of active civic organizations, local businesses that support local community projects, community‐wide fund‐raising capacity, and extra‐local linkages to nearby communities, state, and national agencies, positively affects both industrial recruitment and self‐development. These findings illustrate the need for communities and local activists to carefully weigh their advantages and potential shortcomings when deciding on an economic development strategy.     

Consumer bankruptcy and default: The role of individual social capital

In this paper, we empirically assess the role of individual social capital on personal bankruptcy and default outcomes in the consumer credit market. After controlling for a borrower’s risk score, debt, income, wealth, and legal and economic environments, we find that default/bankruptcy risk rises and then falls over the lifecycle, while a borrower who owns a home or is married has a lower risk of default/bankruptcy. Moreover, a borrower who migrates 190 miles from his “state of birth” is 17% more likely to default and 15% more likely to file for bankruptcy, while a borrower who continues to live in his state of birth is 14% and 10% less likely to default and file for bankruptcy, respectively. A borrower who moves to a rural area is 9% and 7% less likely to default and declare bankruptcy, respectively. We also find that measures of social networks, norms, and cooperation and trust (i.e., aggregate social capital) are inversely related to consumer bankruptcy.     

MULTIPLE REALITIES AND THE EXPERIENCE OF DURATION

This article documents an exploration of the following question: How does transition from one to another subuniverse of social reality shape the individual's sense of duration? That question is addressed through a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness. The data consist of personal testimony in the form of anecdotes that summarize incidents in which time was felt to slow noticeably. Analytic induction is applied to these ethnographic observations. These data suggest that the shock that accompanies relatively distinct shifts from one finite province of meaning to another provokes increased perception of immediate detail as the individual strives to interpret emerging events.