Social Capacity and the Styles of Group Life

Some Inconvenient Wellsprings of Democracy

Bibliographic Data

ID3757246
AuthorsPaul Lichterman (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume52
Issue6
Pages846-866
Publication date2009-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0002764208327662
OpenAlexW2085174702
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited37

This article introduces a concept of social capacity and offers a method of studying it. Social capacity is people's ability to work together to organize public relationships, rather than give responsibility for those relationships wholly to state actors or the flux of market exchange. The article proposes that to study social capacity, we examine the everyday group styles of civic life. Those culturally patterned styles enable and constrain a group's ability to imagine and organize its public relationships with the wider social world. The article applies this approach to the "networking" style of a church alliance in a Midwestern U.S. city, whose members were responding to the welfare policy reforms of 1996. Investigating group style allows a focus on civic relationships, or potential civic relationships, across "sectoral" domains and avoids reifying "civil society," "state," or "market." This analytic approach also avoids the elisions and silences that the popular social capital concept often invites

Alliance · Civil society · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social capital · Social group · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Style (visual arts) · Computer Science · Law · Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Capital and Networks · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub