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“Building Social Capital Without Looking Backward”

by Frances Moore Lappé & Paul Martin Du Bois

National Civic Review, February 14, 1997

Social capital is a wonderfully elastic term that we can all thank Robert Putnam for ushering into public conversation.

Interestingly, the term’s first use was in the 1970s, when Glenn Loury coined it to help explain racial inequality: how the failure of inner-city African Americans to advance could be linked to absent social connections—those informal networks, for example, that most Americans use to land jobs. He called what was missing “social capital.” James Coleman then enlarged the term’s scope in his Foundations of Social Theory in 1990.

But it was Putnam who, expanding its meaning still further, grasped the concept’s potential for understanding how society as a whole functions. He caught the public’s imagination in 1995 with his startling Bowling Alone, an article that has helped turn concern over our society’s diminishing social capital into a bi-partisan preoccupation. Witness the new National Commission on Civic Renewal co-chaired by William Bennett and Senator Sam Nunn and the start-up Institute for Civil Society in which Pat Schroeder is a prime mover.

So what’s this new insight that seems to have gotten everyone fired up? And how might it be made most useful in helping us address our society’s worst problems?

In the growing public debate on social capital, it has come to equal the sum of our informal, associative networks along with social trust—the degree to which we feel we can expect strangers to do right by us. The former, it’s assumed, helps generate the latter.

In other words, social capital typically gets measured in our citizens’ participation in “extracurricular” activities—in voluntary, nonprofit activities, as distinct from the demands of business and government. And its decline is counted in the slipping membership in any number of civic organizations, from Putnam’s famous “animal clubs”—Lion’s, Elk’s and so on—to the PTA.

Through the social-capital lens, civil society—the voluntary sector—is highly valued. It’s the glue that holds us all together and creates those norms of decency needed if other aspects of society are to function. A healthy civil society softens the less-than-civil tendencies of a mercenary marketplace, on the one hand, and puts a check on heartless, intrusive government, on the other.

While this analysis is valuable in highlighting the importance of civil society, we believe it is inadequate. It’s not sufficient to lead us to workable solutions.

For when we chisel through to the single largest barrier blocking solutions to the multitude of “issues” facing us, what we find is not simply diminishing social involvements (and many argue they aren’t diminishing anyway). What we find is the impoverished problem-solving capacity of our people. This is the real crisis.

To help address it, we need to keep the meaning of social capital firmly rooted in people’s capacities to realize their interests, as social capital theorists from Loury to Coleman to Putnam suggest. Beyond our associative networks and the trust they engender, to be useful, social capital must come to mean our collective intelligence—our capacity as a people to create the society we want.

And most Americans believe they don’t have that capacity.

Interestingly, most Americans are remarkably satisfied with their private lives, recent surveys reveal. What they are deeply unhappy about is our public life—the direction our society as a whole is headed. Most feel that public life is beyond their control, that their own values and interests are not reflected in the policies that shape the larger society.

Americans feel unheard. Seven out of ten of us believe that “most elected officials don’t care what people like me think, ” according to the 1996 Survey of American Political Culture by the University of Virginia and Gallup. Eight out of ten agree that “our country is run by a close network of special interests, public officials and the media,” the survey found.

Individually we make choices within the limits that appear open to us, while collectively generating society-wide outcomes that fewer and fewer of us desire. Thus to be a truly useful concept, social capital must come to mean our capacity to go beyond the limits of our constricted, individual choices—our capacity to come together to create options, to invent solutions that as individuals acting alone are outside our reach.

Consider for a moment the limitation in assuming that social capital is merely the sum of our voluntary associations and ambient social trust.

Imagine earlier decades when PTA membership was significantly higher than it is today—when Elk’s clubs and Boy Scouts and Junior Leagues brought many proportionately more of us together in all sorts of friendly exchanges. Social trust appeared to be higher then, too. At least, back then, fearful parents on Halloween night didn’t have to insist to their disappointed children that all but store-wrapped candy be thrown away. Back then, we had never been startled by a car alarm’s blare. Pepper was still a spice—not a spray. And metal detectors were just those gizmos people used to scrounge for buried coins.

Sounds wonderful. But...does our nostalgia allow us to miss a critical insight: it is possible to imagine that former era, or some future one, with higher levels of voluntary association and social trust, and at the same time, no necessary gain in our capacities as citizens to create the society we want.

That’s the problem.

Of course we agree that voluntary associations are a good thing for all of us. Humans clearly are social creatures who thrive best embedded in rich associational networks. And in fact, evidence is growing that our social networks may not be shrinking in any case. They are just changing.

Researcher Andrew Kohut told the National Commission on Civic Renewal that his recent survey -- Trust and Engagement in Metropolitan Philadelphia: A Case Study -- found no evidence that “we are drawing into our own shells.” His study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found Philadelphians to be participating a great deal in voluntary networks.

Those interviewed for the study are very connected--through their churches, gyms, sports groups, self-help groups, and so on. Among those active at all in the last year, respondents said they relate to others in such informal settings about half the days each month, and in ways they find personally enriching. Sixty percent of Philadelphians also say they volunteer--largely through their churches and in programs for the needy and young people.

These findings highlight our point here. It is possible--and indeed it seems to be true--that networks of meaningful association can co-exist with a generalized sense of powerlessness.

It is true that Kohut’s further findings in Philadelphia appear to contradict this point -- since a strong majority of citizens there do feel they are able to have an impact, at least at the community level.

But numerous recent polls, including that by the University of Virginia mentioned above, and in-depth surveys, such as the Harwood Group’s influential 1991 study, “Citizens and Politics,” consistently confirm Americans’ feelings of public impotence when it comes to the larger forces affecting our well being..

In “Citizens and Politics,” Americans reported that they “feel as though they have been locked out of their own homes...evicted from their own property. ...[P]eople know exactly who dislodged them from their rightful place in American democracy,” the report observed. “They point their fingers at politicians, at powerful lobbyists, and ..the media.” One Seattle man in the study put it this way, “It’s not that people no longer have a sense of civic duty. It’s that they don’t have a sense of power.”

This is the crisis that must command our attention. And to be useful in addressing it, the concept of social capital must be stretched still further.

Let us explain why we believe this so strongly. Our research and life experience have taught us that none of our society’s most daunting problems—from poverty to the environment, from racism to crime—can be addressed from the top down. They are simply too deep, interrelated, pervasive and complex. Plus, they require changes in the behavior of millions of people, changes that will never come about unless these “regular citizens” feel themselves part of the decision making. Most of us don’t change because we’re told to; we change because we’ve decided it makes sense.

To be useful, then, social capital must incorporate the concept of “agency”—defined by Webster’s as the capacity for exerting power. By agency we mean Americans’ capacity to realize in the public world our interests and our values developed in large measure through interactions with others.

This refocusing on agency would lead us to ask: what is necessary to strengthen our citizens’ capacities to become co-problem solvers?

Three things come quickly to mind: hope—a belief in the possibility of solutions, real opportunities for citizen engagement, and new public life skills among our citizens.

The first involves a change in perceptions and beliefs about what is possible. In a poll on the heels of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, most Americans said that the primary obstacle to solving our urban problems is that we just don’t know how. Despair is widespread and growing: in the University of Virginia study mentioned above, only one in ten respondents said they felt that, overall, America is improving.

Yet the solution to any problem originates with hope. Hope is the essential motivator in all our lives—it’s what allows us to make the effort, stomach the necessary compromises, and endure the often-lengthy process of tackling anything really important.

To build social capital we have to generate hope that solutions are possible, certainly. But there is another aspect of the necessary perceptual change. We must build awareness of the essential role citizens have to play in addressing our problems. Citizens must perceive a role for themselves.

This perspective suggests very specific guidance for action: we must examine and reshape social influences that now rob us of hope and deny us awareness of what citizens are already achieving.

The media come first to mind. In testimony to the National Commission on Civic Renewal, Dr. Alan Wolfe reported on in-depth interviews conducted in diverse middle-class neighborhoods throughout the country. He said, “We had no question in our study about the media, but the anti-media stuff just poured out of people! The media is so widely disliked in this country.”

He’s right. Seventy-one percent of us now say that the media actually get in the way of solving society’s problems.

But we do not have to resign ourselves to a media that saps hope.

For us, the biggest problem the media presents is not their tendency to emphasize violence and scandal. In building social capital, the biggest problem is what the media don’t cover. They fail to cover the large and growing bottom-up effort of regular citizens to address problems across every sector of our society—in education and health care, government and business, criminal justice and human services, the environment and race relations.

That is why we are delighted by the emergence of public or civic journalism—striving to recreate a media connected to citizens’ concerns. And that’s why we founded The American News Service in 1995—to widen the news lens to cover this vast and expanding universe of public life in America which is not now reported and is therefore invisible. ANS stories of “America’s search for solutions” now go to 1,200 news outlets nationwide, proving to hard-bitten newsroom editors, we hope, that it is possible to write about bottom-up problem solving without being sappy, soft or partisan.

But we each can play a role in influencing the media—in convincing them that hope sells, too. A 1996 Washington Post poll for the Newspaper Association of America found that 65 percent of frequent readers want more stories “that identify possible solutions to problems facing your community.” All who agree can make their views known to the media. They’ll be building social capital.

Perceptions are also shaped, of course, by many institutions beyond the media—by public policy think tanks and philanthropic foundations, just to name two. Schools are especially important. Educators at every level can build social capital by incorporating into every field of study learning about the contributions of regular citizens to public problem solving.

Beyond reshaping perceptions of what’s possible, the second ingredient needed to build social capital is clear. We need opportunities for engagement in public problem solving.

Typically, the discussion of social capital carries within it nostalgia for earlier forms—laments over the decline in membership in organizations that once provided rich community bonds. Our 84-year-old stepmother recently showed us the long white gown she wore with pride in Eastern Star, and spoke of how, over so many decades, she’d held numerous offices in the organization and made lifelong friends. There was sadness in her voice when she spoke of changes Eastern Star is making to try to stem its dwindling membership. “People are just too busy now,” she said.

A problem with nostalgia is that it can sometimes blind us to new opportunities.

In the last 20 years, many thousands of new civic initiatives have sprouted up which cannot be measured by membership figures in Eastern Star, Boy Scouts, the PTA or the Lion’s Club. Moreover, these new types of voluntary associations may offer citizens much greater opportunity for building our capacity as problem solvers.

For example, PTA rolls may be down compared to several decades ago (although they're climbing again), but the power parents exert through this organization may be much greater today. Downwind from the largest hazardous waste-burning cement kiln in the country live two Texas homemakers who have mobilized a PTA campaign to protect kids by setting stricter standards for the waste-burners.

And beyond PTA, parents today are involved with their children's schools in ways that could not have been imagined twenty years ago. Roughly one-third of school districts nationwide are experimenting with new forms of governance, typically called school-based management. In many cases parents now sit in key decision making roles.

Traditional women’s clubs and auxiliaries like Eastern Star may have trouble attracting members. But since the early 1970s, there’s been explosive growth in business and professional women’s associations.

Scout membership may be about what it was 30 years ago despite our growing population, but young people are involved in a range of activities carrying much more responsibility than the organizations we knew as youth in the ‘50s.

At least 5,000 schools now involve youngsters in mediation training and practice in which they learn to help peers resolve conflict without violence.

The Youth Crime Watch of America, founded in 1979, has chapters in 1,000 schools in 16 states. In North Carolina, Students Against Violence Everywhere formed after the shooting death of a West Charlotte High School student in 1989. It blankets that state and has spread to 48 others.

The Student Environmental Action Coalition, less than a decade old, has 10,000 members in 600 chapters nationwide addressing environmental concerns on their members’ campuses and far beyond. And, community service, limited when we were growing up to religious charity functions or Scouting, now enriches the lives of millions of youngsters weekly through school-based programs.

In these roles, many young people are going beyond the typical athletic, debating team and prom-planning activities to take direct responsibility for helping find solutions to problems in their schools and communities.

At the same time, religious congregations are transforming themselves into venues for citizens to learn how, very practically, to act on their faith in the public world. Church attendance has always been counted as a good measure of social capital, for perhaps more than any other institution it is where community bonds are formed and community-friendly values instilled. In the last several decades, however, congregations have expanded social capital in the enlarged sense we are proposing here.

Nationwide, as many as three million families participate through their churches and synagogues in "faith-based organizations" tackling tough social and economic problems.

These growing networks include the Industrial Areas Foundation and the Pacific Institute for Community Organization, working very consciously and creatively to build the capacity of regular citizens to expand public options and make public choices in line with their values.

Just to pick one example: when two congregation-based organizations in San Antonio re-invented job training for that city and came up with a model other cities are now emulating, they built social capital.

Beyond these large networks, individual congregations are taking action. One church in Los Angeles requires each parishioner to join one of its 30 task forces dealing with housing, health, jobs and other concerns, and the obligation doesn’t appear be keeping people away: the First African Methodist Episcopal Church has 12,500 members.

In addition, opportunities for citizens to become co-creators of public solutions, are growing through such institutions as community development corporations, which didn’t even exist 30 years ago. Many are involving ordinary citizens in creating public institutions that invest in—and substantially improve—their communities. In at least one major city, Newark, N.J., a community development corporation, with a strong emphasis on human development, is the largest private employer.

In hundreds of cities and towns, local governments are tapping citizen energy and insight. We see this in community policing, which was just a buzz-word a decade ago and is now established in most major cities. And more than a half-dozen cities have created matching grants programs in which they match citizen effort with municipal dollars. In Seattle, where the approach was born, such grants have encouraged citizens to create more user-friendly parks, after-school programs and any number of other public-life enhancing innovations.

If opportunity for engagement is the second ingredient needed to build this enriched form of social capital—defined as citizen capacity in addition to heightened neighborly good feeling and social trust—there is no reason for gloom. Opportunities are expanding rapidly. And the task of all those who appreciate the importance of social capital is to fuel their spread.

The final ingredient has to do with skills. Few people like to do something they’re not good at, at least for very long. Most of us give up if we don’t see success, at least a little accomplishment. That’s why an emphasis on deliberately nurturing the skills that make one effective in public life is key to building social capital.

In an article of this length, we cannot do justice to this essential ingredient. But suffice it to say here that what we call “the arts of democracy”—active listening, creative conflict, mediation, negotiation, evaluation and so on—must be attended to from the earliest years if we are to build social capital, grounded in a strong sense of agency. That’s why we chalk up to “building social capital” those developments in the classroom in which even gradeschoolers learn to make their own rules and enforce them and in which young people of all ages practice common decision making through cooperative learning projects.

These three ingredients—a change in perception to allow realistic hope for solutions, real opportunities for engagement, and new skills—come into focus as priorities once social capital is rooted firmly in capacity-building.

But there is another useful outcome of unburdening ourselves of nostalgia for the social-bonding institutions of a bygone era. Let us back up for a moment to explain.

Much of the hand wringing over declining social capital centers on the decline in community activities that might be dubbed “extracurricular”—the women’s clubs, and bowling leagues and charity activities.

In trying to understand why these forms of social adhesion appear to be dissolving, many analysts note that people’s rushed lives seem to leave little time for such informal activities.

Professor Putnam, among others, cites the powerful role of television. Television soaks up dozens of hours each week for most Americans, time previously available for civic engagement, they point out. And—just as bad—television’s portrays public life as so nasty and corrupt that no one would want to participate, even if they could drag themselves away from the screen.

Sinking real wages, rising materials expectations, along with the very positive desire of women for achievement through paid employment—they also get blamed for the erosion of civil society because their combined result is more two-worker families and fewer “housewives” with the time to volunteer.

Following this line of argument, what’s the answer? In fact, it’s quite hard to see one. Plying viewers away from their TVs and pulling women out of the work force are not believable strategies.

So one big problem of this view of social capital is that it drives us to a dead-end.

Let’s try coming at the challenge of building social capital from a different spot. What if we start where people already are, where we already are spending a huge portion of our waking hours—school and work, for example? What if those interested in boosting social capital focused on relationships people already have?

This question surfaces what is perhaps a deep root of the social pain we experience today.

We as a society have always assumed that the ways—the norms and expectations—of democratic participation should appropriately live only in “civil society,” narrowly defined, and not within all aspects of public life. We’ve relegated our roles in the workplace, and in institutions such as schools and social agencies, and vis-a-vis government to a world in which democratic, participatory assumptions and practices—except in the thinnest, most formal sense—rarely apply.

In much of the conversation about social capital we sense a longing to go backward. But perhaps the real challenge is not to return to an era when more of us were “joiners.” We can instead move forward to a new era in which we are enabled to function as common problem solvers within all aspects of our public lives.

In other words, maybe the challenge is not simply to enhance civil society, re-igniting the volunteer realm—however vital that renewal is to our society’s health. Just as important is infusing the principles, norms, and expectations of civil society into the all arenas of public life.

So we would like not only to broaden and strengthen the popular meaning of social capital, grounding it firmly in the concept of agency. We would like to widen the discussion of social capital—stretching it to include all aspects of our common problem solving capacities. We would like to enlarge it far beyond any narrow association with civil society.

And indeed, once we do so, many possibilities for strengthening social capital become visible. The approach suggests we take people where they are, in the roles they now hold, rather than expecting most people to add new roles.

The roles most of us already play are as students, parents, workers, media and product consumers, church goers and voters. What if we imagined our enhanced social capital emerging not only from Americans joining civic organizations but also by simply participating in new ways in these existing roles?

Our argument here is in no way meant to gainsay the vitally important role of the voluntary sector in creating a life-serving democracy, but simply to stretch our thinking beyond it. (How could we downplay the nonprofit world since we have been part of it all our lives!)

Once looking beyond the voluntary sector, we see many roles in which people are building social capital.

As students. Social capital is being built today, as we underscore above, in thousands of schools in which youngsters are learning common problem solving through cooperative learning projects and through community service in which town becomes text.

As workers. Trade union efforts to involve workers as active members, not simply cardholders, and worker self-management teams—both offer possibilities for building social capital.

As employers. Not only are some employers restructuring the workplace to provide workers with opportunities for problem solving, but some are also allowing workers to use paid time for certain community activities.

As consumers of products and the media. Realizing that production responds to how we spend and invest our dollars, more and more consumers are making those choices conscious in order to affect social outcomes. Some are deliberately “buying green,” and others are investing with discretion. One out of every ten dollars in the hand of fund managers in the U.S. today is part of a responsibly invested portfolio, according to Professor Severyn Bruyn of Boston College.

As religious congregants. A noted above, social capital building might best be measured not only by the total attendance in places of worship but by the dramatically enhanced role of religious groups in involving members in real community problem solving.

Acknowledging these already-existing public life roles—including those outside what is commonly thought of as civic life—and appreciating the potential they hold for building social capital is liberating.

We can let go of an depressing image of ourselves as locked permanently in stunting roles in our economic lives and in highly limited roles vis-a-vis government—with our only hope for contributing to a healthier society being what we can squeeze in around the edges by participating in the nonprofit, voluntary sector.

We are delighted by the intensified public discussion of social capital and civil society. But let us use this opportunity to gain a more holistic sense of ourselves as public beings.

Let’s deepen the meaning of social capital so that it is firmly grounded in capacity building. It then has real teeth, real utility.

Let’s drop our nostalgia for past forms of social capital, thereby opening our eyes to the rich opportunities this era offers.

And let’s not restrict our understanding of social capital building to civil society, narrowly understood as the voluntary sector. Let us build on all the public life roles we already play, including but reaching beyond the voluntary sector.

We’re convinced that social capital cannot be built by scolding citizens to carry the burden of democracy—to care more, to volunteer more, to be more civil. It can best be built as we respond to citizens’ legitimate anger at their exclusion from public decision making and work in all dimensions of public life to build citizens’ capacities to create the society they want.