BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  17. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).

  18. Maria T. Poarch, “Civic Life and Work: A Qualitative Study of Changing Patterns of Sociability and Civic Engagement in Everyday Life,” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1997), 166.

  19. Michael Novak, Business as a Calling (New York: Free Press, 1996), quotation at 146–50; Thomas H. Naylor, William H. Willimon, and Rolf Österberg, The Search for Meaning in the Workplace (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1996); Carolyn R. Shaffer and Kristin Anundsen, Creating Community Anywhere: Finding Support and Connection in a Fragmented World (New York: Perigree, 1993).

  20. Paul Osterman, “How Common Is Workplace Transformation and How Can We Explain Who Does It?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 47 (January 1994): 173–188; Peter Cappelli, The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999): 146–147, and the works cited there; Claudia H. Deutsch, “Communication in the Workplace; Companies Using Coffee Bars to Get Ideas Brewing,” New York Times, November 5, 1995; Arlie Russell Hochschild, “There’s No Place Like Work,” New York Times Magazine, April 20, 1997, p. 53.

  21. Ellen Galinsky, James T. Bond, and Dana E. Friedman, The Changing Workforce (New York: Families and Work Institute, 1993), 24; James T. Bond, Ellen Galinsky, and Jennifer E. Swanberg, The 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce (New York: Families and Work Institute, 1998), 106, 103, 161. On friendship at work, see sources cited in endnote 24. Author’s analysis of a Scripps-Howard/Ohio University national survey of interpersonal communication, June 1997.

  22. Gallup Poll Social Audit on Black/White Relations in the United States, Executive Summary (Princeton, N.J.: Gallup Organization, June 1997); Peter Marsden, “Core Discussion Networks of Americans,” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 122–131; Diana C. Mutz and Jeffrey J. Mondak, “Democracy at Work: Contributions of the Workplace Toward a Public Sphere,” unpublished manuscript, April 1998.

  23. In addition to evidence later in this chapter, see also the discussion of figure 77 in chapter 14.

  24. Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Barry Wellman, R. Y. Wong, David Tindall, and Nancy Naxer, “A Decade of Network Change: Turnover, Persistence and Stability in Personal Communities,” Social Networks 19 (1997): 27–50; Bruce C. Straits, “Ego-Net Diversity: Same- and Cross-Sex Co-worker Ties,” Social Networks 18 (1996): 29–45; Gwen Moore, “Structural Determinants of Men’s and Women’s Personal Networks,” American Sociological Review 53 (1990): 726–735; Stephen R. Marks, “Intimacy in the Public Realm: The Case of Co-workers,” Social Forces 72 (1994): 843–858; Peter Marsden, “Core Discussion Networks of Americans.”

  25. Thomas R. Horton and Peter C. Reid, Beyond the Trust Gap: Forging a New Partnership Between Managers and Their Employers (Homewood, Ill.: Business One Irwin, 1991), 3; Cappelli, Bassi, et al., Change at Work, 67–69; and more generally, Cappelli, New Deal at Work; and Charles Heckscher, White Collar Blues: Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

  26. Cappelli, New Deal at Work, 17; on outplacement, see Horton and Reid, Beyond the Trust Gap, 9.

  27. In 1989, 63 percent of workers said that employees were less loyal to their companies than ten years earlier, while only 22 percent said employees were more loyal: Horton and Reid, Beyond the Trust Gap, 10, citing a survey by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. While restructuring hurts employee commitment, it often boosts productivity. See Cappelli, New Deal at Work, 45–46, 122–136, and Cappelli, Bassi, et al., Change at Work, 53–65, 79–84.

  28. Heckscher, White Collar Blues, quotations at 6, 12, 49, 73. In a few firms Heckscher found a new form of limited community: “I’ll do my best for you while I’m here, but neither of us sees this as a long-term relationship.” See also Horton and Reid, Beyond the Trust Gap, 9–10, 40–43; Cappelli, Bassi, et al., Change at Work, 79–84; and Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

  29. Cappelli, New Deal at Work, 14.

  30. Points of Light Foundation, Corporate Volunteer Programs: Benefits to Business, Report 1029, Fact Sheet (Washington, D.C., n.d.); Hodgkinson and Weitzman, Giving and Volunteering 1996, 4–111; Giving and Volunteering in the United States: Findings from a National Survey, 1999 Executive Summary (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1999). The fraction of volunteers who report being asked specifically by their employer is even lower—about 7–8 percent.

  31. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America: 1998–99, Economic Policy Institute (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. 227–235; Cappelli, New Deal at Work, 133–135.

  32. Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, State of Working America, 242–250; Cappelli, New Deal at Work, 136–144; Cappelli, Bassi, et al., Change at Work, 73–78; Sharon R. Cohany, “Workers in Alternative Employment Arrangements: A Second Look,” and Steven Hipple, “Contingent Work: Results from the Second Survey,” both in Monthly Labor Review (November 1998): 3–35.

  33. Ronald S. Burt and Marc Knez, “Trust and Third-Party Gossip,” in Roderick M. Kramer and Tom R. Tyler, eds., Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), 68–89, esp. 77; Katherine J. Klein and Thomas A. D’Aunno, “Psychological Sense of Community in the Workplace,” Journal of Community Psychology 14 (October 1986): 365–377, esp. 368; Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends. According to 1986 GSS data, the fraction of one’s close friends who are co-workers is only two-thirds as great for part-time workers as for full-time workers.

  34. Jeanne S. Hurlbert, “Social Networks, Social Circles, and Job Satisfaction,” Work and Occupations, 18 (1991): 415–430; Randy Hodson, “Group Relations at Work: Solidarity, Conflict, and Relations with Management,” Work and Occupations 24 (1997): 426–452; Ronni Sandroff, “The Power of Office Friendships,” Working Mother (November 1997): 35–36, and the works cited there.

  35. Gallup Poll Monthly, no. 332 (May 1993): 21; and http://www.gallup.com (October 1999); respondents with “no opinion” are excluded. Cheryl Russell, The Master Trend: How the Baby Boom Generation Is Remaking America (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), 64. Author’s analysis of General Social Survey, 1972–98: job satisfaction fell from c. 65 percent to c. 61 percent among workers fully content with their financial situation, from c. 48 percent to c. 43 percent among those more or less content with their finances, and from c. 36 percent to c. 30 percent among those dissatisfied with their finances. Glenn Firebaugh and Brian Harley, “Trends in Job Satisfaction in the United States by Race, Gender, and Type of Occupation,” Research in the Sociology of Work 5 (1995): 87–104, report no change in job satisfaction through the 1980s, and Bond, Galinsky, and Swanberg, The 1997 National Study of the Changing Work-force, ch. 7, found modest growth in job satisfaction between 1977 and 1997. On the other hand, Cappelli, New Deal at Work, 122–123, reports that after decades of relative stability, several proprietary survey archives found declining job satisfaction after the early 1980s. I have found no hard evidence on incivility and aggression at work over time, though most Americans believe that it has grown; see John Marks, “The American Uncivil Wars,” U.S. News & World Report, April 22, 1996; Joel H. Neuman and Robert A. Baron, “Aggression in the Workplace,” in Antisocial Behavior in Organizations, eds. Robert A. Giacalone and Jerald Greenberg (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), 37–67; and Christine M. Pearson, Lynne H. Andersson, and Judith W. Webner, “When Workers Flout Convention: A Study of Workplace Incivility” (unpublished ms., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999).

  36. Wolfe, “Developing Civil Society,” 45.

  37. John R. Aiello, “Computer-Based Work Monitoring: Electronic Surveillance and Its Effects,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23 (1993): 499–507; Cynthia
L. Estlund, “Free Speech and Due Process in the Workplace,” Indiana Law Journal 71 (1995): 101–151; David C. Yamada, “Voices from the Cubicle: Protecting and Encouraging Private Employee Speech in the Post-Industrial Workplace,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 19 (1998): 1–51; “More U.S. Firms Checking E-Mail, Computer Files, and Phone Calls” (New York: American Management Association, April 1999). Thanks to Jason Mazzone for his contribution to this section.

  CHAPTER 6: INFORMAL SOCIAL CONNECTIONS

  1. Every single bivariate correlation among the dozens of measures in the DDB Needham Life Style and Roper data sets of the macher activities listed in the text is strongly positive, controlling for education, age, gender, race, and marital status. All but two of the scores of correlations among the several dozen measures of the listed schmoozer activities are strongly positive, controlling for the same demographic factors. The distinction between involvement in formal community organizations and involvement in informal social activities appears clearly in factor analyses of both the Roper and DDB Needham surveys. The correlation between formal and informal involvement is positive, but modest.

  2. All generalizations in the next two paragraphs are confirmed by multiple regression analysis of the demographic correlates of church and club attendance, volunteering, visiting friends, entertaining at home, playing cards, visiting bars, and the like, in both the Roper Social and Political Trends and DDB Needham Life Style archives.

  3. Data on letter writing and phone calls from Roper Social and Political Trends and DDB Needham Life Style archives; data on gifts from Gallup Poll Monthly 293 (February 1990): 31, and International Communications Research Survey Research Group, on behalf of Sears Corporation, 1997; data on greeting cards and time with friends from the DDB Needham Life Style archive; data on computer usage from “Computer Use in the United States,” U.S. Census Bureau (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1999), 5, 9. According to time diaries women spend more time than men visiting with friends and informally conversing. Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), quotation at 235. Fischer shows that women everywhere have always been much heavier users of home phones. Even in the liberated 1990s young women were “more likely than males to express concern and responsibility for the well-being of others,” according to Ann M. Beutel and Margaret Mooney Marini, “Gender and Values,” American Sociological Review 60 (1995): 436–448, and Constance A. Flanagan et al., “Ties That Bind: Correlates of Adolescents’ Civic Commitments in Seven Countries,” Journal of Social Issues 54 (1998): 4457–4475. Differences in “social cognition” between men and women may even have a genetic basis. See D. H. Skuse et al., “Evidence from Turner’s Syndrome of an Imprinted X-Linked Locus Affecting Cognitive Function,” Nature 387 (June 1997): 705–708.

  4. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style archive.

  5. Karen V. Hansen, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 80.

  6. Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1962); Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends; and Wellman, “The Community Question Reevaluated.”

  7. Robert R. Bell, Worlds of Friendship (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1981); Marsden, “Core Discussion Networks of Americans.”

  8. This question was posed to national samples of roughly two thousand each in 1982, 1984, 1990, 1993, and 1995. Answers add to more than 100 percent because more than a single evening out could have been cited.

  9. Roper national samples of approximately 2,000 each in June 1986, April 1987, and June 1990 were asked about a wide variety of social and leisure activities, as indicated in figure 16.

  10. The disparity between hosting and going out reflects the fact that guests outnumber hosts at most parties.

  11. Author’s analysis of the Americans’ Use of Time archive.

  12. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style archives. Because the various Roper (past week; past month) and Life Style (past year) questions are formulated differently, one cannot directly to compare responses, but the patterns are quite consistent. For example, the relative frequency of restaurant dining, home entertaining, club meetings, visits to bars, movies, and sporting events is virtually the same in all three types of surveys.

  13. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys.

  14. According to the DDB Needham Life Style data, as figure 17 shows, over the last quarter of the twentieth century the average annual frequency was twelve card games and five movies.

  15. The top half of figure 18 is based on DDB Needham Life Style data; the bottom half is based on Roper Social and Political Trends data. Because sampling and wording differ between these two archives, the two halves of figure 18 are not directly comparable, but the fact that two such different archives show similar declines in social visiting is all the more significant. DDB Needham Life Style surveys also show that dinner parties (given or attended) declined from 7.1 per year in the mid-1970s to 3.7 in the late 1990s. Yankelovich Partners Inc. report that agreement that “I have very little room in my life for new friends these days” rose from 23 percent in 1985–86 to 32 percent in 1998–99. (I am grateful to Yankelovich Partners for sharing these data.) Mediamark Research annual surveys show a drop of onefifth between the early 1980s and the late 1990s in the frequency of “entertaining friends or relatives at home.” Finally, eight times between 1938 and 1990 Gallup pollsters asked about one’s “favorite way of spending an evening.” Over the whole period “dancing” and “playing cards and games” dropped sharply, and after the 1970s “visiting with friends” and “dining out” also dropped. “Watching TV” and “home with family” rose over this period, suggesting a cocooning pattern consistent with the Roper and DDB Needham data. On the other hand, because of changes in wording, I am less confident about the Gallup trends. (See George Gallup Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion [Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1986], 104, 130.) According to the General Social Survey, the frequency of spending a social evening with “friends who live outside the neighborhood” more than once a month rose from 40 percent in 1974–76 to 44 percent in 1994–96. Of the six national survey archives that I have discovered with trend data on friendship over the last several decades, this is the only series that does not show a significant decline. (Unlike other measures of friendship, this GSS metric is also inexplicably more common among men than women.) See also Robert J. Sampson, “Local Friendship Ties and Community Attachment in Mass Society: A Multilevel Systemic Model,” American Sociological Review 53 (October 1988): 766–779; Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends; Claude S. Fischer, Robert M. Jackson, et al., Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting (New York: Free Press, 1977).

  16. According to DDB Needham Life Style data, restaurant dinners rose from eighteen annually in 1975–76 to twenty-two in 1998–99 for married people and declined from 19 in 1985–86 to eighteen in 1998–99 for single people. The National Restaurant Association (NRA) reported (www.restaurant.org/RUSA/trends/craving.htm) that the number of “commercially prepared dinners per week” was 1.2 in 1981, 1985, and 1991, and 1.3 in 1996. Of “commercially prepared” food, moreover, a rapidly growing share is take-out, so restaurant dining has slipped. Both the NRA and Life Style data suggest that the only significant increase in eating out over the last several decades is at breakfast. Real annual per capita spending on food and drink outside the home rose almost imperceptibly over the last three decades from $476 in 1967 (in 1997 dollars) to $499 in 1997. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Annual Benchmark Report for Retail Trade: January 1988 Through December 1997,” Current Business Reports, Series BR/97-RV (Washington, D.C.: 1998). According to Consumer Expenditure Surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, spending on food away from home as a fraction of all food spending was stationary over the period 1984–1997, rising cyclically during prosperous periods to a peak of 43 percent and falling during recessions t
o a low of 38 percent, with no long-term trend at all. This same business cycle pattern in dining out appears in Roper Social and Political Trends data from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, with no secular trend. The NPD time diary study described in endnote 40 below shows a slight trend away from eating out over the decade of the 1990s. In short, none of the available evidence suggests that dining out has significantly increased over the last several decades.

  17. According to a Roper Social and Political Trends question posed three times between 1986 and 1994 (as summarized in Roper Reports 94–10 [New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1995]), 62 percent of Americans prefer “getting together with friends in your home,” whereas 31 percent prefer “going out with friends to a restaurant, bar, or club.” Over this period, those who preferred going out slipped from 34 percent to 28 percent, while the fraction who volunteered that they were not interested in spending time with friends at all rose from 2 percent to 6 percent. In fact, this growing stay-at-home sentiment applies to virtually all leisure activities measured in the Roper surveys, from movies to music to take-out food.

  18. According to the DDB Needham Life Style surveys, picnics per year among American adults fell from 4.9 per year in 1975 to 2.0 per year in 1999. John P. Robinson, “Where’s the Boom?” American Demographics (March 1987): 36, reported a 20 percent decline in picnicking between 1962 and 1982.

  19. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style survey archive. The fraction of married respondents in the DDB Needham Life Style surveys who agree that “we usually have a big weekend family breakfast” fell from 57 percent in 1975 to 45 percent in 1995. Although the frequency of family meals differs between couples with and without children, the trends over time are identical.

  20. Single-person households doubled from 13 percent in 1960 to 26 percent in 1998, while the fraction of married couple households fell from 74 percent to 53 percent. See Lynne M. Casper and Ken Bryson, “Household and Family Characteristics: March 1998 (Update),” Current Population Reports, P20–515 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, October 1998).