Introduction: Community Development and Social Capital

This set of papers on social capital collectively raises very interesting theoretical, methodological, and applied questions about the concept and its application. Not surprisingly, they do not resolve those questions, although they provide some useful directions for future research and for applied community development work. Bridger and Alter, in the lead article in this issue, examine the state of both urban and rural communities and the potential for progressive community development outcomes in those communities by enveloping political economy analysis within Wilkinson's interactional framework. They examine the effects of global capitalism on U.S. communities and neighborhoods, identifying growing spatial, class, and ethnic inequalities, as well as the contrasting leveling effect of the telecommunications revolution. All of these patterns, they argue, militate against community social capital as an engine of change for place-based community development. In effect, Bridger and Alter answer the question, "Do communities act?," in the negative, as does Wilkinson, who provides inspiration for their work: [C]ommunity development, when it occurs, is one part of the larger process of community change. Ecological, organizational, situational, and other forces converge to structure and alter the relationships among people in a local setting, and random events also bring turbulence to the local arena. Given this it would be an error to say that "the community acts" in any literal sense, even in situations where community actions might occur. Instead, people act, and their actions connect with the acts of others to form action [social] fields (1991, p. 92). Bridger and Alter argue that an interactionist perspective provides a better basis for understanding efforts to promote community development than does a perspective focusing on social capital, and that, given all the cross-cutting loyalties of community residents and the openness of community boundaries, such perspective provides the basis for progressive change without the necessity of trust (a central feature of social capital, since at least a minimal level of trust must exist to achieve higher degrees of social capital). Another way of stating the question is as follows: is progressive community development (what Wilkinson, 1991, calls the community field, a special case of the social field) a result of enduring patterns of relationships (trust, stable although changing networks, norms of reciprocity) or does it usually arise from structures of shifting interaction involving local and extra-local actors responding primarily to external forces on the community? Or does progressive generalized community and neighborhood development sometimes fit one of these perspectives and other times the other? The other three social capital articles in this issue suggest that communities can and sometimes do act. Agnitsch et al., state it this way: "Although the question 'Do communities act?' has long been of great interest to community sociologists, the answer today is, 'They better act,'" citing the declining support for community-level improvement from state and federal sources (p. 37, this volume). Emery and Flora agree with Bridger and Alter that social capital is not the key to explaining why community development is successful in certain communities and not in others; nor do they believe that financial capital is the key. Rather, it is the combination and integration of different kinds of capital that is central for understanding community change. Social capital is indeed an important link in that chain, but not the only one. They argue that it is important to address political capital separate from social capital to insure that political power is treated explicitly. They introduce the idea of an upward or downward spiral of capitals, reminiscent of Myrdal's concept of cumulative causation, but they see social capital as a glue or ligament for holding the other kinds of capital together in a purposeful chain. …