BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  8. On neighborhood effects, see Christopher Jencks and Susan E. Mayer, “The Social Consequences of Growing Up in a Poor Neighborhood,” in L. E. Lynn Jr. and M. G. H. McGeary, eds., Inner-City Poverty in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990), 111–186; and Martha A. Gephart, “Neighborhoods and Communities as Contexts for Development,” in Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Greg J. Duncan, and J. Lawrence Aber, eds., Neighborhood Poverty: Volume 1 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 1–43.

  9. W. N. Evans, W. E. Oates, and R. M. Schwab, “Measuring Peer Group Effects: A Study of Teenage Behavior,” Journal of Political Economy 100 (1992): 966–991. Greg J. Duncan, James P. Connell, and Pamela K. Klebanov, “Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Estimating Causal Effects of Neighborhoods and Family Conditions on Individual Development,” in Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber, eds., Neighborhood Poverty: Volume I, 219–250; and Jencks and Mayer, “Social Consequences.”

  10. Anne C. Case and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Company You Keep: The Effects of Family and Neighborhood on Disadvantaged Youths,” NBER Working Paper 3705 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1991); M. E. Ensminger, R. P. Lamkin, and N. Jacobson, “School Leaving: A Longitudinal Perspective Including Neighborhood Effects,” Child Development 67 (1996): 2400–2416.

  11. Susan E. Mayer and Christopher Jencks, “Growing Up in Poor Neighborhoods: How Much Does It Matter?” Science, March 17, 1989, 1441–1445; and Ingrid Gould Ellen and Margery Austin Turner, “Does Neighborhood Matter? Assessing Recent Evidence,” Housing Policy Debate 8 (1997): 833–866.

  12. Furstenberg and Hughes, “The Influence of Neighborhoods on Children’s Development”; Margery Austin Turner, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sheila O’Leary, and Katherine Carnevale, “Location, Location, Location: How Does Neighborhood Environment Affect the Well-Being of Families and Children?” unpublished ms., May 1997.

  13. Turner, Ellen, O’Leary, and Carnevale, “Location, Location, Location.”

  14. Robert J. Sampson, “Family Management and Child Development: Insights from Social Disorganization Theory,” in Joan McCord, ed., Facts, Framework, and Forecasts: Advances in Criminological Theory, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 63–93.

  15. See chapter 6.

  16. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 144.

  17. Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 4, 69, 72.

  18. Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277 (August 15, 1997): 918–924.

  19. R. J. Sampson and W. B. Groves, “Community Structure and Crime: Testing Social Disorganization Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 4 (1989): 774–802. See also Edward L. Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote, and Jose A. Scheinkman, Crime and Social Interactions, NBER Working Paper 5026 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995).

  20. Ora Simcha-Fagan and Joseph E. Schwartz, “Neighborhood and Delinquency: An Assessment of Contextual Effects,” Criminology 24, no. 4 (1986): 667–703.

  21. Darling and Steinberg, “Community Influences on Adolescent Achievement and Deviance,” 120–131.

  22. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: Norton, 1999).

  23. Darling and Steinberg, “Community Influences.”

  24. Herbert C. Covey, Scott Menard, and Robert J. Franzese, Juvenile Gangs, 2nd ed. (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1997), 23–30, 161–185.

  25. I am grateful to Karen Ferree for her review of the literature on gangs and social capital.

  26. Joan W. Moore, Homeboys (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).

  27. Ruth Horowitz, Honor and the American Dream (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 187.

  28. Shakur’s appalling experiences are described in Kody Scott [Sanyika Shakur], Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (New York: Penguin, 1994).

  29. Moore, Homeboys.

  30. John Hagedorn and Perry Macon, People and Folks: Gangs, Crime and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1988).

  31. Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  32. Ko-Lin Chin, “Chinese Gangs and Extortion,” in Ronald Huff, ed., Gangs in America (Newbury Park, Calif: Sage Books, 1990).

  33. Jankowski, Islands; Moore, Homeboys.

  34. Kristin A. Goss, “‘We All Have to Come Together: Moms’ Role in Disarming Kids in the Nation’s Capital,” master’s thesis, Duke University, 1996.

  35. Paul A. Jargowsky, “Beyond the Street Corner: The Hidden Diversity of High-Poverty Neighborhoods,” Urban Geography 17 (1996): 579–603.

  36. Carol B. Stack,All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 28.

  37. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Street Corner Men (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), argues instead that among the unmarried and unemployed men who hang out on urban streets, social relations are superficial and transient. Lee Rainwater’s Behind Ghetto Walls, a study of St. Louis’s infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project (Chicago: Aldine De Gruyter, 1970), describes a world of alienation and distrust, both within the family and among neighbors.

  38. At least one author has challenged the assumption that extended kin networks are necessarily good for low-income people. When members of the kin group use or sell drugs, these networks become transmission belts passing drug use down through the generations. See Eloise Dunlap, “The Impact of Drugs on Family Life and Kin Networks in the Inner-City African-American Single Parent Household,” in Adele V. Harrell and George E. Peterson, eds., Drugs, Crime, and Social Isolation: Barriers to Urban Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1992).

  39. Mary Benin and Verna M. Keith, “The Social Support of Employed African American and Anglo Mothers,” Journal of Family Issues 16 (1995): 275–297; R. Kelly Raley, “Black-White Differences in Kin Contact and Exchange Among Never Married Adults,” Journal of Family Issues 16 (1995): 77–103; Dennis P. Hogan, David J. Eggebeen, and Clifford C. Clogg, “The Structure of Intergenerational Exchanges in American Families,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1428–1458; Dennis P. Hogan, Ling-Xin Hao, and William L. Parish, “Race, Kin Networks, and Assistance to Mother-Headed Families,” Social Forces 68 (1990): 797–812.

  40. Wesley G. Skogan, “Community Organizations and Crime,” in Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, eds., Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, volume 10 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

  41. Wesley Skogan and Susan Hartnett, Community Policing: Chicago Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), quotation at 160; Christopher Winship and Jenny Berrien, “Boston Cops and Black Churches,” Public Interest 136 (1999): 52–68.

  CHAPTER 19: ECONOMIC PROSPERITY

  1. Fukuyama, Trust; La Porta et al., “Trust in Large Organizations”; Knack and Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff?”

  2. Economist Glenn C. Loury, one of several independent “inventors” of the concept of social capital, did so to capture the fact that even if the human and financial capital advantages of white Americans were neutralized, their richer connections to mainstream American institutions—their “social capital”—would give them an advantage unavailable even to middle-class members of minority communities. See Glenn C. Loury, “The Economics of Discrimination: Getting to the Core of the Problem,” Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy 1 (1992): 91–110.

  3. Mary Corcoran, Linda Datcher, and Greg Duncan, “Most Workers Find Jobs through Word of Mouth,” Monthly Labor Review (August 1980): 33–35; Montgomery, “Social Networks and Labor-Market Outcomes”; Burt, “Contingent Value of Social Capital”; Maura A. Belliveau, Charles A. O’Reilly III, and Jam
es B. Wade, “Social Capital at the Top: Effects of Social Similarity and Status on CEO Compensation,” Academy of Management Journal 39 (1996): 1568–1593; Joel M. Podolny and James N. Baron, “Resources and Relationships in the Workplace: Social Networks and Mobility in the Workplace,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 673–693.

  4. Mark S. Granovetter, Getting a Job (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

  5. Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Making It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985).

  6. Joleen Kirschenmann and Kathryn M. Neckerman, “‘We’d Love to Hire Them, But …’: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson, eds., The Urban Underclass (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991), 203–232; David T. Ellwood, “The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Are There Teenage Jobs Missing in the Ghetto?” in Richard B. Freeman and Henry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 147–185.

  7. John D. Kasarda, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” in Paul E. Peterson, ed., The New Urban Reality (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985); John D. Kasarda, “Urban Industrial Transition and the Under-class,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501 (January 1989): 26–47.

  8. John D. Kasarda, “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass”; Henry J. Holzer, “The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: What Has the Evidence Shown?” Urban Studies 28, no. 1 (1991): 105–122.

  9. Katherine M. O’Regan, “The Effect of Social Networks and Concentrated Poverty on Black and Hispanic Youth Employment,” Annals of Regional Science 27, no. 4 (December 1993): 327–342.

  10. Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Ivan Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

  11. James H. Johnson Jr., Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, and Walter C. Farrell Jr., “Bridging Social Networks and Female Labor Force Participation in a Multi-Ethnic Metropolis,” in Prismatic Metropolis: Analyzing Inequality in Los Angeles, Lawrence D. Bobo, Melvin L. Oliver, James H. Johnson, Jr., and Abel Valenzuela, eds. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

  12. Corcoran, Datcher, and Duncan, “Most Workers Find Jobs through Word of Mouth”; and Gary P. Green, Leann M. Tigges, and Irene Browne, “Social Resources, Job Search, and Poverty in Atlanta,” Research in Community Sociology 5 (1995): 161–182.

  13. Richard B. Freeman, “Who Escapes? The Relation of Churchgoing and Other Background Factors to the Socioeconomic Performance of Black Male Youths from Inner-City Tracts,” in Richard B. Freeman and Henry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 353–376.

  14. Burt, Structural Holes; Burt, “The Contingent Value of Social Capital”; Nan Lin, “Social Networks and Status Attainment,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 467–487, and the works cited there; Brian Uzzi, “Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital: How Social Relations and Networks Benefit Firms Seeking Financing,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999) 481–505; Paul Dimaggio and Hugh Louch, “Socially Embedded Consumer Transactions: For What Kinds of Purchases Do People Most Often Use Networks?” American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 619–637.

  15. Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg, “Missing the Connection: Social Isolation and Employment on the Brooklyn Waterfront,” Social Problems 43, no. 2 (May 1996): 180–196.

  16. Loïc J. D. Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501 (1990): 8–25.

  17. Kasinitz and Rosenberg, “Missing the Connection.”

  18. Manuel Pastor Jr. and Ara Robinson Adams, “Keeping Down with the Joneses: Neighbors, Networks, and Wages,” Review of Regional Studies 26, no. 2 (1996): 115–145.

  19. Green, Tigges, and Browne, “Social Resources.”

  20. Ibid.

  21. Catherine Zimmer and Howard Aldrich, “Resource Mobilization Through Ethnic Networks: Kinship and Friendship Ties of Shopkeepers in England,” Sociological Perspectives 30 (1987): 422–445.

  22. Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner, “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (May 1993): 1320–1350; Woolcock; “Social Capital and Economic Development.”

  23. Kenneth Temkin and William Rohe, “Social Capital and Neighborhood Stability: An Empirical Investigation,” Housing Policy Debate 9, no. 1 (1998): 61–88.

  24. This history of Tupelo’s development is borrowed from the excellent account by Vaughn L. Grisham Jr., Tupelo: The Evolution of a Community (Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation, 1999).

  25. AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 36.

  26. Dara Elizabeth Menashi, Making Public/Private Collaboration Productive: Lessons for Creating Social Capital, unpublished doctoral dissertation, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1997.

  27. Saxenian, Regional Advantage, 161.

  28. Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sable, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

  29. Francis Fukuyama, Trust; William G. Ouchi, “Markets, Bureaucracies and Clans,” Administrative Science Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1980): 129–141; Lynne G. Zucker, “Production of Trust: Institutional Sources of Economic Structure, 1840–1920,” Research in Organizational Behavior 8 (1986): 53–111.

  30. Walter W. Powell, Kenneth W. Koput, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, “Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology,” Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (1996): 116–145; Jane A. Fountain, “Social Capital: A Key Enabler of Innovation,” in Investing in Innovation: Toward a Consensus Strategy for Federal Technology Policy, L. M. Branscomb and J. Keller, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998): 85–111.

  31. For recent work on social capital and economic development, see Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective, Partha Dasgupta and Ismail Serageldin, eds. (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2000); Social Capital and Poor Communities, Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren, eds. (forthcoming); and Michael Woolcock, Using Social Capital: Getting the Social Relations Right in the Theory and Practice of Economic Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  CHAPTER 20: HEALTH AND HAPPINESS

  1. For comprehensive overviews of the massive literature on health and social connectedness, see James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson, “Social Relationships and Health,” Science 241 (1988): 540–545; Lisa F. Berkman, “The Role of Social Relations in Health Promotion,” Psychosomatic Medicine 57 (1995): 245–254; and Teresa E. Seeman, “Social Ties and Health: The Benefits of Social Integration,” Annual of Epidemiology 6 (1996): 442–451. Other useful recent overviews include Benjamin C. Amick III, Sol Levine, Alvin R. Tarlov, and Diana Chapman Walsh, eds., Society and Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. Donald L. Patrick and Thomas M. Wickizer, “Community and Health,” 46–92; Richard G. Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: From Inequality to Well-Being (New York: Routledge, 1996); Linda K. George, “Social Factors and Illness,” in Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences 4th ed., Robert H. Binstock and Linda K. George, eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1996), 229–252; Frank W. Young and Nina Glasgow, “Voluntary Social Participation and Health,” Research on Aging 20 (1998): 339–362; Sherman A. James, Amy J. Schulz, and Juliana van Olphen, “Social Capital, Poverty, and Community Health: An Exploration of Linkages,” in Using Social Capital, Saegert, Thompson, and Warren, eds.

  2. B. H. Kaplan, J. C. Cassel, and S. Gore, “Social Support and Health,” Medical Care (supp.) 15, no. 5 (1977
): 47–58. L. F. Berkman, “The Relationship of Social Networks and Social Support to Morbidity and Mortality,” in S. Cohen and S. L. Syme, eds., Social Support and Health (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1985), 241–262; J. S. House, D. Umberson, and K. R. Landis, “Structures and Processes of Social Support,” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1988): 293–318. Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy, and Roberta Glass, “Social Capital and Self-Rated Health: A Contextual Analysis,” American Journal of Public Health 89 (1999): 1187—1193.

  3. Lisa Berkman, “The Changing and Heterogeneous Nature of Aging and Longevity: A Social and Biomedical Perspective,” Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics 8 (1988): 37–68; Lisa Berkman and Thomas Glass, “Social Integration, Social Networks, Social Support, and Health,” in Social Epidemiology, Lisa F. Berkman and Ichiro Kawachi, eds. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), 137–174; T. E. Seeman, L. F. Berkman, and D. Blazer, et al., “Social Ties and Support and Neuroendocrine Function: The MacArthur Studies of Successful Aging,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 16 (1994): 95–106; Sheldon Cohen, “Health Psychology: Psychological Factors and Physical Disease from the Perspective of Human Psychoneuroimmunology,” Annual Review of Psychology 47(1996): 113–142.

  4. Berkman and Glass, “Social Integration, Social Networks, Social Support, and Health.”

  5. Kawachi et al., “Social Capital and Self-Rated Health.”

  6. The Pearson’s r coefficient between the fraction reporting they were in fair or poor health and the (demographically weighted) state mistrust ranking (low, medium, high) was 0.71; the r coefficient between fraction of population in fair/poor health and the (demographically weighted) state “helpfulness” ranking (low, medium, high) was -0.66.

  7. The Pearson’s r coefficient between the Social Capital Index and the Morgan-Quitno health index (1991–98) across the fifty states equals 0.78, which is strong by conventional social science standards; the comparable correlation between the Social Capital Index and the age-adjusted all-cause mortality rate is -.81. Thanks to Ichiro Kawachi for providing this measure of death rates.