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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

Chapter Four develops the understanding that Bourdieu’s forms of capitals have affective properties and propensities, arguing that they need to be understood as skills and capacities for lubricating success in a particular field, and emphasizing how capitals work in the specific everyday moments and encounters where relationality matters and class is made, patrolled and reproduced. The forms of capitals that Bourdieu and others have developed are themselves ‘affective’ in that how they work stems from an assemblage of material, temporal, spatial, and relational factors and their affects. Affective competence is the embodiment of hierarchical social relations that explain how social magic happens. The chapter also argues that what is traditionally theorised as capital convergence is an affective transference that transmit relations of distinction and the maintenance of who gets to define morals, ethics and values.

This chapter begins by considering the distinction between sex and gender. The latter constitutes the source of the social division between men and women considered as social beings. It serves as both a reflection of division and inequality and a source of difference and identity. The chapter then explores the framing of this division in terms of patriarchy and the inequalities that are organised by and structured within the relations of work and of social reproduction. It focuses next upon the consequences of such a division, first in terms of both financial assets and resources and then in terms of social relational capital, drawing upon Putnam’s distinction between bridging and bonding capital. It then considers other sources of difference that become more salient in later life, in terms of health illness and longevity. The chapter ends with the role of gender in representing later life, and the role of later life in representing gender. It concludes by distinguishing between gender as a structure shaping third age culture, and gender as a constituent in the social imaginary of the fourth age.

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.

How do migrants and people of migrant descent move between the different segments of the labour market? This is the main focus of chapter 6, which uses micro-level analyses of everyday experiences to reveal how migrants change their place on the labour supply chain. The chapter presents interest convergence, social capital and equal opportunity as three vehicles with which migrants negotiate their way through racially stratified societies. The way the labour market experiences of migrants align to any of these concepts has long-term implications for everyone, including the creation of racialised ghettos and tripartite segmentation in the labour market. Intersecting vulnerabilities including gender and age that foster (inter-)intra-group layering also form part of the chapter.

The Conclusion ends this clinical ethnography with recommendations, suggesting that interventions for autism attend not only to individual bodies but also to the repair of strained social ties and the rebuilding of social capital. Drawing on follow-up interviews with the youth on the spectrum whose experiences inform the rest of the book, as they now move into young adulthood, the chapter describes the places where they have successfully found and maintained a sense of connection and community. Using literacy scholar James Gee’s concept of an “affinity space” as a starting point, this chapter identifies characteristics shared by the communities favored by these youth. Such spaces tend to be organized around a shared interest, activity, or affinity, characterized by an ethic and aesthetic of connection and repair, and motivated by an accessible notion of virtue that can be cultivated through practical action. As such, they may provide advantages not offered by traditional social skills groups. Through such work to maintain local connections, the social disorder arising from Asperger’s syndrome, autism, and other forms of neurodevelopmental difference can be addressed where it takes place: not only within individuals but between us as well.