SOWO 804 Community Practice Models/Theories and Social Capital

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SOWO 804Community Practice Models/Theories and
Social Capital

• Lecture V

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Community Practice Models/Theories

• Social Work
• Ministering to the individual needs (health,
  family development, recreation, aid for indigent,
  aged, etc.)
• Ministering to community (??)
• Community Development
• Planned action to address peoples concerns in a
  defined area

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Community Practice Models/Theories

• Who Defines Community
• Internal Leaders
• External Leaders
• Community Social Work Practice
• Skills
• Cultural Awareness
• Needs Assessment
• Applying Social Work Theories to Practice

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Poverty and Community

• Poverty Results From a Deficit in
• Income?
• Mainstream Values?
• Persistent Poverty
• Concentrated Poverty
• The Underclass

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Welfare Reform Policy

• Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF),
  1988
• Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act
  (1996)
• Faith-Based Remedies to Poverty

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When Affirmative Action Was White

• U. S. Government Allocated more than 100 billion
  between the late 1930s-1955 to Support
• SOCIAL SECURTIY most work done by minoritiesfarm
  and domestic work-- not covered
• PROTECTIVE LABOR LAWS excluded minorities
• JOB TRAINING excluded minorities
• HOME OWNERSHIP loans rarely given to minorities
• GI BILL
• JOB CEILINGS
• Asset Building Saving, Investing, Education?
• Will asset-building work for the poor?

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Changing Context of Community Practice

• Historical models
• Multicultural Context
• Feminist and Human Rights Context
• 21st Century Practice Models
• Neighborhood/ Community Organizing
• Functional Communities Organizing the Poor?
• Social and Economic Development
• Social Planning for the Poor
• Program Development and Community Liaison
• Politics and Social Action
• Coalitions, Social Movements

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Social Capital
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What is social capital

• Social capital is decomposable into two elements
• The social relationship itself that allows
  individuals to claim access to resources
  possessed by their associates
• The amount and quality of those resources
  Bourdieu (1980, 1985)

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Strengths-Based

• Social capital focuses attention on the positive
  consequences of sociability.
• It emphasizes those positive consequences in the
  framework of a broader discussion of capital and
  calls attention to how such non-monetary forms
  can be important sources of power and influence,
  such as cultural capital and informal supports.

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Relationships

• Economic capital is in peoples bank accounts,
  human capital is in their heads, and social
  capital exists in the structure of relationships
• To possess social capital, a person must be
  related to others, and it is those others and not
  himself/herself who are the actual source

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Social Capital Has Three Basic Functions

• As a source of control
• As a source of family support
• As a source of benefit through extra-familial
  networks

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Social Capital As A Source of Control

• Parents, teachers, police to seek to maintain
  discipline and promote compliance among those
  under their charge
• Bounded in solidarity and enforceable trust
• Social control leads to the disappearance of
  those informal family and community structures
  that produce social capital

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Social Capital A Source of Family Support

• Sources of parental and kin support
• Intact families, and those where one parent has
  the primary task of rearing children, possess
  more of this form of social capital than do
  single-parent families, or those where both
  parents work?
• McLanahan Sandefurs (1994) monograph, Growing
  up with a Single Parent, examines the
  consequences of single parenthood for school
  achievement and attrition, teenage pregnancy, and
  other adolescent outcomes
• Social capital is often lower for children in
  single parent families that lack the benefit of a
  second at-home parent, and have high
  residential mobility--- leading to fewer ties
  to adults in the community

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Familial Support

• Parcel Menaghan (1994) examined the effects of
  parent work on childrens cognitive and social
  development
• They concluded that parents intellectual and
  other resources contribute to the forms of family
  capital useful in facilitating positive outcomes
  for children
• They also found that common beliefs about a
  negative effect of maternal work during infancy
  are over-generalized

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Familial support

• Multiple family moves impacts childrens
  emotional adjustment and educational achievement?
• Leaving a community tends to destroy established
  bonds and deprive family and children of major
  sources of social capital?
• Parental support of child development is a source
  of cultural capital

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Social Capital As A Source of Benefits Through
Extra-familial Networks

• Carol Stack (1974), All Our Kin, explains
  everyday survival in poor urban communities
  frequently depends on close interaction with kin
  and friends in similar situations
• The problem is that these ties seldom reach
  beyond the inner city, thus depriving their
  inhabitants of sources of information about
  employment opportunities and ways to attain them
• Movement out of Black inner city areas have left
  the remaining population bereft of social
  capital, leading to high levels of poverty,
  unemployment, and welfare dependency

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Extrafamilial networks

• Valenzuela Dornbush (1994) highlight the role
  of family networks and a family orientation in
  the academic achievement of Mexican-origin
  students
• Immigrant families compensate for the absence of
  the outside networks form of social capital
• There is an emphasis on social capital in the
  form of familial support, including preservation
  of the cultural orientations of their home country

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The Communitarian Perspective

• The communitarian view of social capital
  emphasizes the number and density of local
  organizations (e.g., clubs, associations, etc.)
• The prevailing opinion is that social capital is
  inherently good, that more is always better, and
  that the presence of social capital will always
  have a positive effect on a communitys welfare
  (Woolcock Narayan, 2000)
• This perspective has built in a risk and
  resilience analytic perspective on poverty by
  stressing the centrality of social ties in
  helping poor families manage risk and
  vulnerability

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The Communitarian Perspective (contd)

• However, a major shortcoming of the communitarian
  view of social capital is that it assumes that
  communities are homogeneous and that all members
  are provided the same opportunities and benefits
• Some families involved in the combination of
  substance abuse, incarceration, and kinship care
  may be experiencing discrimination and poverty
  disproportionate to others in their own
  communities
• Methodologically, in the communitarian view,
  social capital is an independent variable which
  produces various outcomes

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The Network Perspective

• This network view recognizes that strong
  intra-community ties give families and
  communities a sense of identity and common
  purpose (Woolcock Narayan)
• A challenge to the network view of social capital
  is to identify the conditions under which the
  positives of building social capital in poor
  families and communities can be harnessed and its
  integrity retained
• At the same time, we must help the family and
  community gain access to formal, mainstream
  institutions

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Institutional Perspective

• Emphasizes the political, legal, and economic
  environments in the development of family and
  community networks
• Unlike the communitarian and network
  perspectives, the institutional view measures
  social capital as a dependent variable
• This institutional view seems to assume equal
  access to institutions, which would not include
  circumstances facing the disadvantaged poor or
  families from other cultures

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The Synergy Perspective

• Integrates the work emerging from the network and
  institutional perspectives
• Based upon principles in anthropology and
  comparative political economy, the synergy view
  was examined to determine conditions that foster
  working together

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The Synergy Perspective

• Evans (1996) concludes that the synergy view is
  based on complementarity and embeddedness
• Complementarity refers to mutually supportive
  relations between private and public actors and
  is exemplified in institutional frameworks that
  facilitate exchanges and protect the rights of
  association
• Embeddedness refers to the nature and extent of
  these complementary ties
• Building social capital suggests that different
  interventions are needed in different
  combinations to meet the needs of individuals,
  families, neighborhoods and communities

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The Synergy View Suggests Three Central Tasks

• To identify the nature and extent of social
  relationships and formal institutions, and the
  extent of the interaction between them
• To develop institutional strategies based on
  these social relations, particularly the extent
  of building social capital
• To determine how the positive manifestations of
  social capital (cooperation, trust, and
  institutional efficiency) can offset
  sectarianism, isolationism, and corruption
  (Woolcock Narayan, 2000)--related to a risk and
  resiliency perspective