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Through a series of empirical analyses of individual-level survey data from the National Election Study and the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, as well as analysis of aggregate electoral turnout data at the county level, this chapter examines the immediate and lasting effects of the considerable variance in communities' wartime experience in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II, on their residents' patterns of political engagement and participation. The analysis reveals very different dynamics in the wake of the three conflicts. Across the data sets, statistical models find that respondents from communities that suffered higher casualty rates in Vietnam and Korea reported lower levels of trust in government, interest in politics, and electoral and nonelectoral political participation than respondents with identical demographic characteristics from cities and towns that sustained lower casualty rates in these conflicts. By contrast, respondents from communities that endured the heaviest burdens in World War II were just as politically engaged as their peers, if not more so. However, while the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea may have fundamentally reshaped citizens' relationship with the federal government, citizens did not let their resentment toward government policies affect all of their participatory activities. More nuanced data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey reveal that Vietnam casualty rates had no discernible impact on nonpolitical forms of civic engagement such as charitable giving, volunteering, and organizational activity.

Sense of community is a feeling of belonging, of being able to influence others, of shared history and emotional connections, and that one’s needs are being met within a particular community. Where there is a strong sense of community, people are more likely to cooperate with neighbors to improve their surroundings. Social capital refers to the presence of social networks and trust, along with volunteering or civic participation. When communities have social capital, people are more likely to join together to take action to benefit their community. Collective efficacy is the willingness of people to intervene for the common good. A neighborhood demonstrates collective efficacy when people are willing to pick up litter, call out kids who are skipping school or harassing others, or plant a community garden on a vacant lot. Studies have shown that neighborhoods that demonstrate collective efficacy have lower crime rates. Civic ecology practices demonstrate collective efficacy, or willingness to intervene for the common good. In a feedback process, civic ecology practices also depend on the presence of a sense of community and social capital and may build greater sense of community and social capital.

Implicit in the study of social movements is the fact that movements require many people collectively participating together in some fashion to succeed. Social capital—the valuable social connections individuals have with others—is one way of approximating people's relationships to each other. Movements both require social capital in order to form and succeed, but movements also create social capital while organizing. This chapter explores the ideas from major social capital theorists, including James Coleman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Robert Putnam, and considers the value of social capital (which is infrequently utilized in movement analysis) for anarchist movements. Important attributes of social capital, such as trust, information channels, norms, and others receive particular focus. A closer inspection suggests that the dense networks of anarchist association serve as a bulwark against state repression, but also alienates the movement from wider audiences, unless efforts are not made to popularize discursive frames and organizing methods. The World Values Survey is used to explore the extent to which anarchist-inclined people—who trust in others, but lack confidence in government—throughout the world are more apt to protest and advocate revolution.

Drawing on a four-year study that explored the significance of social capital for children and parents during the transition to secondary school, this chapter explores the relationship between families' responses to school choice policies and children's everyday geographies. In so doing, it reflects critically on the spatial connotations of, and tensions between (national) school choice policies and wider drives by the New Labour government to promote (local) cohesion. It is apparent that from parents' and children's perspectives that imagined, aspirational and fearful geographies are implicated in the process of school choice.

Chapter 3 begins with a description of how the dimensions of social capital–network ties, trust, and shared social norms–are critical to the generation of solidarity, the first of the necessary micro-level factors affecting an individual’s propensity to participate in a social movement. This chapter presents an interview and participant observation study that was conducted in a coal-mining town and a demographically similar non-coal-mining town in West Virginia to examine social capital losses in coalfield communities. The analysis suggests that the causes of the coalfield town’s social capital deficit include extensive depopulation and conflicts related to the de-unionization of coal mines in the region. Due to the fact that both of these processes have been widespread throughout Central Appalachia over the past three decades, it is likely that this social capital depletion can be generalized to other coalfield communities. The chapter ultimately argues that the destruction of social capital in Appalachian coal-mining communities is part of the story explaining the low levels of local involvement in the coalfield environmental justice movement.

This chapter reviews the main academic and practitioner discussions of what gives chambers their USP. It explores how unity of voice is developed through deliberation. It shows that earlier academic views of instability of early chambers are overstated. The forces underpinning collective action and free-rider behaviour are examined to demonstrate how chamber service bundles develop: as trust goods based on transaction costs and networking advantages. Institutional benefits and social capital assist chamber development. Additions to service bundles from government contracts are shown to have tensions of ‘non-preferred’ goods. Political non-alignment, and social networks are critical aspects of the historical and modern chamber brand. However, at critical points chambers have been ‘elite’ social movements that have participated in changing frames and policy repertoires; especially during times of extreme contention.

This chapter describes the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, 60-foot tsunami, and nuclear meltdown which make up Japan’s 3/11 disasters. After introducing theories of resilience and recovery, it defines networks and governance and illuminates how they affect disaster survival and recovery. Focusing especially on the main categories of social capital – bonding, bridging, and linking – this chapter lays out the structure for the overall book.

This chapter, in conjunction with Chapter 2, provides the overall context for the book. First, this chapter locates undocumented migration within the broader theoretical paradigms that consider economic, structural and migration systems as drivers for international migration as well as the structural and state based factors that result in irregular migration. Secondly, we explore the literature on social capital in the form of networks. These networks can, on the one hand act as a trap while on the other hand as a mechanism for securing some, even if extremely minimal, resources for undocumented migrants and is central to our analysis. Thirdly the literature on the labour market experiences and strategies among undocumented migrants will be examined, alongside that of ethnic enclave employers, including their preferences for certain types of workers who are often from the same ethnic group and perceived to be hard working and compliant. Throughout we will address the main cleavages of gender, class, power and status that frame the analysis in the empirical chapters.

The chapter explores the relevance of community organising in the present globalised world. To do so the chapter defines current development issues and goals, and considers: asset building, capacity building, capability, social capital creation, human needs, quality of life, wellbeing and happiness, sustainability and empowerment

This chapter sets out the broad problematic of the book, which explores how lifelong learning is understood and enacted across Europe and how this is changing over time. Tensions between understandings of lifelong learning as a generator of human capital and social capital are explored. Different conceptions of lifelong learning, the learning society and social inclusion are examined in the context of evolving EU lifelong learning policy. It is argued that the Lisbon Strategy goal of achieving ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’ has been only partially achieved, and future progress is threatened by the ongoing economic crisis.

The potential of older people’s participation in leisure activities as a means of creating community capital is an expanding focus of research by gerontologists although to date the leisure engagement of rural elders has received comparatively little attention. This chapter focuses on older people’s connections to rural community life through their engagement in cultural and leisure activities. Older rural residents’ leisure participation and its determinants are considered from a life course perspective as well as the forms and uses of later life leisure within the rural community context. Findings from the GaPL survey on types and frequency of current participation in individual and group-oriented hobbies and social activities are presented. Patterns of participation across life stages are examined through findings from oral histories focused on respondents’ ‘leisure lives’. The chapter also describes a community oral history project designed to raise awareness of older people as rural social and cultural capital and to increase public engagement with this research that formed part of this work.

Chapter Four specifically focuses upon banking services which are broadly recognised as a gateway to financial inclusion. Drawing upon broader debates relating to coping strategies and assets frameworks, the chapter highlights the diverse financial strategies which migrants deploy in order to engender banking inclusion in London. These strategies are shaped by the local and transnational financial, social and civic assets which migrant men and women are able to operationalise. The chapter highlights the legal and illegal nature of migrants' financial practices with the latter including the sharing of identities and the purchase of bank accounts. Finally, the chapter considers the fragility of some of these strategies such that far from engendering financial inclusion, they further erode migrants' assets.

This chapter examines transport in the remote rural and island areas, with a particular focus on the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. I explore 50 years of failure to address the rural transport problem, highlighting how population distribution and destination competition have conspired with funding issues and car use to thwart efforts to arrest the decline in rural bus use. In the second part of the chapter I discuss car dependence, how it varies across different types of rural locality and the importance of someone else’s car in maintaining rural access and mobility. Part three examines the impact of rising fuel costs in rural areas, but argues that large scale investment in roads and bridges have had a much more significant long-term impact on people’s travel habits, changing the way that life is lived in the region. I conclude with some reflection on the game-changing potential of technological innovation such as AVs for remote and rural areas.

The chapter provides the analytical framework for this cross-national comparison. Applying a neo-institutional lens, the Institutional Capacity Building Framework is presented to analyse and compare the transformation and institutionalisation of social, political and intellectual capital during the implementation of both Area-based Initiatives.

What opportunities for learning outside school were made available, pursued, and rejected by members of the class? Here we particularly focus on the ways that families from different kinds of social backgrounds—traditional middle-class, more bohemian, and highly educated families, along with desperately aspirational parents, especially those who had experienced some of the tragedies of enforced migration, as well as those who live their lives far more involved in community practices far away from the classrooms of London—provided for, encouraged, and defined learning for their offspring. We pay particular attention to forms of cultural capital, which is the kind of knowledge and expectations that stem from parental education and, of course, wealth. We describe how different homes construct opportunities for learning physically (how they arrange rooms and resources, especially technology), socially (how they establish habits and rhythms), and conceptually (how they see the purpose and nature of learning). The chapter concludes by setting these descriptions in the context of debates about whether and how digital media can be expected to overcome the more fundamental challenges faced by education in the risk society and by problematizing what connections between home and school mean in practice.

Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin all provide examples of how successful mid-twentieth-century female entrepreneurs in large-scale manufacturing companies carved out a place for themselves at the top of the American business world by leveraging their relationships with the men in their personal and professional lives. The goal here is to understand the way in which this generation of women hampered by marriage bars, professionally crippling domestic expectations and lack of access to higher education, made the most of their relationships with male family members to plot their paths into business leadership and ownership. Access to social capital was particularly key for women breaking into the male-dominated manufacturing fields Lewis, Beech and Rudkin occupied, and male family members provided that connection. Privilege paved the way toward entrepreneurship and leadership for all three women too—another corollary of the ties they forged and leveraged through marriage.

This chapter discusses the Grey and Pleasant Land project on rural ageing which focused on older people’s connections to and participation in community life in diverse rural settings in southwest England and Wales. The interdisiplinary approach used to investigate the types, extent and experiences of older people’s ‘connectivity’ in these rural places is described, including the combination of empirical and arts-based methods. Seven principal types of connectivities identified are elaborated using examples from the research findings: civic engagement; social participation; intergenerational relations; connections to the landscape; connectivity and group identity; virtual connectivity; and imaginative connectivity. The implications of these connectivities of older people as sources of rural community capital with the potential to sustain ageing populations in these areas are discussed.