Le capital social comme outil d’intervention : accès et mobilisation dans une école secondaire en milieu défavorisé et multiethnique

The premise of this research is that “social resources count”, meaning that they can play a compensating role and help students with a priori underprivileged conditions to “pull through” when they come up against difficulties during their educational path. It follows the lead of much scientific literature (Kamanzi & al., 2007) and research reports (Deniger & al., 2011) that establish a link between a school’s social capital and academic success. More precisely, this research aims to study the mobilization that students do with a school’s social capital (teacher, guidance counselor, psychoeducator, monitors, etc.) in an underprivileged and multiethnic school of Montreal. The suggested theoretical framework is multidimensional. It combines the three dimensions emerging from the main approaches of social capital: the cognitive (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1989), normative (Coleman, 1988 ; Putnam 2000) and structural dimensions (Bourdieu, 1986 ; Burt, 2000 ; Lin, 1999). Its main framework is structuration theory (Giddens, 1984): it articulates these constitutive dimensions of the suggested model by re-centering the action on students.   The methodological approach consists of an ethnographic case study (Merriam, 1998). It lasted three years and a half and was done in a high school, in an underprivileged and multiethnic neighbourhood of Montreal. It is based on a variety of methods of data collection – in which participant observation is the common thread, and that allows the answering of several questions, constituting as many steps towards the study and production of social capital: what is the production context of social capital (media study)? What is the accessible social capital (study of the school’s official documents)? What is the mobilized social capital (study of surveys on social networks)? What are the mobilization processes of social capital (group interviews and spontaneous exchanges)?  The thematic analysis revealed that students did not mobilize social capital according to the normative framework of the school, but that they mobilized the social resources according to eight processes that rest on their leeway and their adhesion to the school’s system. The interpretation is an occasion to revisit the multiple internal tensions that emerge from “meaning negotiations” (Morrissette, 2010) between students and the institution. With this in mind, the concept of “school form” (Vincent, 1980) allows the reversal of the perspective and questions the school’s capacity to produce social capital for students that encounter difficulties. Better understanding the production of social capital on the organizational level leads to potential propositions to intervene more effectively on behalf of the population being studied. One of the paths that is proposed focuses on mediation (Fontaine, 2011) ans the specific role that social capital mediators play, these “institutional agents” (Stanton-Salazar, 2011) that gravitate on the periphery of educational form. Their interventions take root in a more global approach that favours the students’ power, all while reinforcing their ties with the establishment. Unfortunately, these agents do not possess the ideal space for their action in the school.

Keyphrases: Social capital, Structuration theory, Education policies