sowo 804 community practice models/theories and social capital lecture v
TRANSCRIPT
SOWO 804Community Practice Models/Theories and Social Capital
Lecture V
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 people’s concerns in a defined area
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
Poverty and Community Poverty Results From a “Deficit” in:
Income?
Mainstream Values?
Persistent Poverty
Concentrated Poverty
The “Underclass”
Welfare Reform Policy
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), 1988
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996)
Faith-Based Remedies to Poverty
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 minorities—farm 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?
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
Social Capital
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)
Strengths-Based
Social capital focuses attention on the positive consequences of sociability, while putting aside its less attractive features in assessment.
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.
Relationships
Economic capital is in people’s 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
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
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
Social Capital: A Source of Family SupportSources 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 & Sandefur’s (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
Familial Support
Parcel & Menaghan (1994) examined the effects of parent work on children’s 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
Familial support
Multiple family moves impacts children’s 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
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
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
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 community’s 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
The Communitarian Perspective (cont’d)
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
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
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
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
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
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