We need a minimum standard of living for all citizens if we wish to achieve community cohesion

Many debates about welfare policy rest on implicit or explicit claims about the social ramifications of welfare spending. Matthew Donoghue suggests that community cohesion is a crucial issue to be considered as part of such debates. He argues that individual autonomy, ensured by a minimum standard of living, stands as a necessary condition for community cohesion

Community Revitalization in the United States and the United Kingdom

Summarizes a comparison of American and British approaches to community revitalization, cohesion, and sustainability based on visits and policy seminars. Identifies key issues including race, public and private sectors, and individual and community focus

Egomunities, Exploring Socially Cohesive Person-based Communities

In the last few years, there has been a great interest in detecting overlapping communities in complex networks, which is understood as dense groups of nodes featuring a low outbound density. To date, most methods used to compute such communities stem from the field of disjoint community detection by either extending the concept of modularity to an overlapping context or by attempting to decompose the whole set of nodes into several possibly overlapping subsets. In this report we take an orthogonal approach by introducing a metric, the cohesion, rooted in sociological considerations. The cohesion quantifies the community-ness of one given set of nodes, based on the notions of triangles - triplets of connected nodes - and weak ties, instead of the classical view using only edge density. A set of nodes has a high cohesion if it features a high density of triangles and intersects few triangles with the rest of the network. As such, we introduce a numerical characterization of communities: sets of nodes featuring a high cohesion. We then present a new approach to the problem of overlapping communities by introducing the concept of ego-munities, which are subjective communities centered around a given node, specifically inside its neighborhood. We build upon the cohesion to construct a heuristic algorithm which outputs a node's ego-munities by attempting to maximize their cohesion. We illustrate the pertinence of our method with a detailed description of one person's ego-munities among Facebook friends. We finally conclude by describing promising applications of ego-munities such as information inference and interest recommendations, and present a possible extension to cohesion in the case of weighted networks

Perceived Community Cohesion and the Stress Process in Youth

Using survey data from two youth samples, one rural and one urban, we examine the role and significance of perceived community cohesion in the stress process. In particular, we assess the extent to which community attachment and detachment are related to depressed mood, problem substance use, and delinquency net of social statuses, stress exposure, and personal attributes. In addition, we explore the degree to which those dimensions of community cohesion explain or condition the links between the above stress-process components (e.g., social statuses, stress exposure, and personal attributes) and well-being. We find remarkably similar results across samples: community attachment is related to lower odds of problem substance use and delinquency; community detachment is related to higher levels of depressed mood, problem substance use, and delinquency; and community attachment buffers the link between stress and problem substance use. With respect to depressed mood, however, the rural youth show greater vulnerability to stress than the urban youth and unique benefits from community attachment compared to the latter. Our findings highlight the roles of community attachment and detachment in the stress process and underscore the importance of each for youth well-being in rural and urban settings

Education, Equity and Social Cohesion : A Distributional Model [Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No. 7]

This report - the first from the Centre’s comparative strand of research - focuses on the effects of education on social cohesion at the societal level. The research involved two elements. The first was a theoretical analysis and critique of models in the existing international and comparative literature on education, social capital and social cohesion. This led to the development of a new hypothetical model relating skills distribution to social cohesion. The second part of the research used cross-national, quantitative techniques to test the model on aggregated data for 15 countries. The analysis suggests that educational distribution may be a very significant influence on societal cohesion in certain contexts. Improving levels of education alone may not foster social solidarity if inequalities of skill and income persist. The findings here have important policy implications. Existing policies focus on developing the individual resources and competences which will help to build social capital and community cohesion. However, these will not necessarily impact on cohesion at the societal level. Creating a more cohesive society is likely to require policies that are also designed to increase equality through narrowing educational outcomes

Economic Disparities Between Eu States And Regions

EU has 27 Member States representing a community and a market of 493 million citizens, which creates further economic and social disparities between the states and their 271 regions. In a region in four, the GDP (gross domestic product) per capita is 75% below the average for the EU-27. Based on the concepts of solidarity and cohesion, regional policy of the European Union favors reducing structural disparities between EU regions, the balanced development of the community and promoting an effective equality of opportunity between people. Over the past 50 years, European cooperation has helped build highways, sewage plants, bridges, laboratories for biotechnology. She helped to revive urban areas and neglected activities, through countless projects in the poorest regions of the Union.. Two key values: solidarity and cohesion, underlying these projects and the regional policy of the European Union. The economic, social and territorial cohesion will always be at the heart of Europe Strategy 2020, a key mechanism for achieving the priorities for a smart growth, sustainable and inclusive in the Member States and regions.European Union, economic disparities, political cohesion, GDP per capita

Schools, communities and social capital: building blocks in the 'Big Society' (Research associate full report)

"This study looked at how effective schools engage with their communities. Its aim was to identify key mechanisms that promoted community engagement. It also sought to determine the impact this had on the amount and nature of social capital available to pupils, parents and the wider community. Effective schools were found to generate significant amounts of social capital within their institutions as demonstrated by the degree of trust, reciprocity, civic engagement and social cohesion. Pupil voice was a powerful mechanism in developing a sense of control and self-efficacy. Recently created posts such as family workers, therapists and social work placements extended much of this impact into the family. Schools that went further to promote social capital in the neighbourhood were those with a more aspirational vision that went beyond simply engaging the community to aid school improvement. They viewed community empowerment as key to the success of their pupils and families within the wider social context. They encouraged community leadership and decision-making, often through informal learning approaches, and truly became ‘hubs of the community’, facilitating community development and promoting community cohesion. The findings suggest that a more reciprocal view is needed of the relationship between school and community and that schools could play a central role in creating the ‘Big Society’.

Moving on from ‘anti-racism’? Understandings of ‘community cohesion’ held by youth workers

‘Community Cohesion’, and the apparent lack of it, was rapidly offered as the explanation for the 2001 disturbances across northern England, and has since become a cornerstone of government approaches to race relations policy. This article explores what Community Cohesion means to welfare practitioners in Oldham, one of the affected towns. Academic discussion of Community Cohesion has been largely hostile, focusing on the language and assumptions of the government reports. While highlighting important issues, these debates have been virtually free of empirical evidence on how Community Cohesion is actually being understood and operationalised by welfare practitioners. Drawing on in-depth research with youth workers in Oldham, I argue that the Community Cohesion analysis of the state of race relations is largely accepted, and supported, by those youth workers, and that it has enabled a significant shift in the assumptions and operations of their professional practice. Within this ‘modal shift’ in practice is a moving away from the language and assumptions of ‘anti-racism’, as it has been largely understood and operationalised by youth workers on the ground, towards what I argue can be seen as ‘critical multi-culturalism