So Robert Putnam then...

Re-reading my notes on Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone...

He talks about social capital as both a private and public good, and that both bonding (which he also calls "sociological superglue") and bridging ('sociological WD-40") social capital can occur in the same space/group (he uses the examples of a black church which bonds ethnicity but bridges class).

He has a good quote about the value of bonding social capital for ethnic groups - "Dense networks in ethnic enclaves...provide crucial social and psychological support for less fortunate members of the community, while furnishing start-up financing, markets, and reliable labour for local entrepreneurs. Briding networks, by contrast are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion". Based on this, one useful hypothesis for charities/immigrant groups would be the extent to which they could access social capital both within and without the community. It would be good to be able to plot this on an X (bridging) and Y (bonding) graph but I've no idea how to measure these in terms of charities (and Putnam says that there aren't surveys to distinguish between the two). There might also be differences in immigrant groups being able to use "thin trust" (another aspect of Putnam's social capital), which can extend beyond those one knows to a wider group. eg some immigrant groups may feel that they can trust those in their group whereas others may not (would religion have a role here?).

And on religious affiliation and social capital - "the social ties embodied in religious communities are at least as important as relious beliefs per se in accounting for volunteerism and philanthropy...Connectedness, not merely faith, is responsible for the benficence of church people".

On individual involvement and altruism - depends partly on involvement when young, and also people who have received help are more likely to help others: "giving, volunteering and joining are mutually reinforcing and habit forming - as Tocqueville put it, 'the habits of the heart'."

Poorer people need (and may therefore seek out?) more social capital precisely because they lack economic capital and can have difficulty gaining human capital (eg barriers to education). From a US perspective, Putnam suggests that church attendance is what influences black youths ability to gain employment, and this is becuase of the social networking effects rather than beliefs. need to check references to this in Kidd book on nineteenth century

On this, Putnam points out the role of ethnic networks as employment networks as they can use employees to recruit and train new employees as well as resulting in good employee morale and more company loyalty. It can also be related to acquisition of financing for smaller businesses, who can lack access to traditional financial institutions (and which were much more limited in nineteenth century London).