Linking Indigenous Social Capital to a Global Economy

Although the concept of social capital is intuitively appealing, policy-makers and scholars have been frustrated by difficulties in finding practical ways to build social capital where it is either weak or absent. Of particular concern in development work has been the difficulty of building bridging forms of social capital to more effectively integrate isolated groups into a global economy. A main source of resistance, in this regard, is the apparent unwillingness of groups with highly dense social networks to invest some of their resources in building less dense but more extensive ties that will connect them to more distant markets, resources, and information. This concern is central to the larger issue of reducing economic inequalities between groups that are based on differential access to social capital, such as the entrepreneurial advantages of one ethnic or religious group vis-à-vis another. In the long run, a solution to this problem will reduce inter-group tensions where two groups with different levels of social capital occupy the same space. The thesis of this paper is that the main obstacle to solving the aforementioned problem is the failure to distinguish between the "structural properties" of effective bridging social networks and the "paths" through which individual groups create bridging networks. The starting point of the paper is the assumption that the structural properties of effective bridging networks can be defined quite easily. The work of Mancur Olson has been most useful in this regard. However, the identification of different paths through which the same structural network properties may be created has received much less attention in the literature. In fact, the notion of "path dependencies" has oftentimes resulted in a view that different paths must mean different structural network property outcomes. This limited view of paths to effective social capital neglects the real concerns and potentially serious costs of destroying "bonding" social capital in the process of building bridging ties. The psychological and spiritual damage to Native Americans through the boarding school programs in the 19th and early 20th centuries is an illustration of this danger. Thus, the task for researchers is to identify specific paths through which indigenous social capital may be connected to bridging ties without creating costs to essential bonding tie relationships. Empirical research examples from thirty years of the author's study of collective action in communities in a variety of settings is used to illustrate how different paths can achieve the same outcomes with respect to building bridging ties for isolated communities. This includes: urban neighborhood organization, Japanese American ethnic communities, rural Midwestern American rural community leaders' networks. Village communities in post-Soviet Russia, Tribal Colleges on Native American reservations and Nationalist and Republican communities in Northern Ireland.

Connecting the Missing Link: Bringing Together Global Philanthropists and Global Community Philanthropy Organizations

In a project begun in 2011, Synergos brought together individual philanthropists and leaders of community philanthropy organizations (CPOs) from around the world to learn about and understand the potentially transformative benefits of forming partnerships to address societal problems.This project has opened a number of doors to creating opportunities for community foundations and philanthropists to extend their reach as well as significantly increase the impact of their work. It has substantially raised awareness and has also created safe spaces for constructive dialogue on how to move forward in working together. These spaces can now be transformed into more practical "laboratories" to address community problems

A Multilateral Approach to Bridging the Global Skills Gap

[Excerpt] In 2012, McKinsey & Company forecasted a troubling outlook on the labor market through the year 2020. The report highlighted three talent shortages across the globe: nearly 40 million too few college educated workers in the global labor market; a 45 million shortfall of workers with secondary and vocational education in developing countries; and up to 95 million workers that lack the skills needed for employment in advanced economies. This global crisis is known as the skills gap. It impacts nearly every industry, job and employer. Simply put, critical talent supply will fail to meet employment demand in the coming decade. Such an imbalance can be crippling to economic progress, put strain on governments, and leave millions unemploye

The Emerging Role of Universities in Collective Impact Initiatives for Community Benefit

Universities are increasing their efforts to more clearly demonstrate their social value. This article illustrates how higher education administrators can incorporate collective impact partnerships in their community benefit strategies. The article explores two of the more familiar paradigms for community benefit—community engagement and anchor institution. Collective impact principles and practices are then presented. Finally, a case study provides a tangible example of how one university’s role in a collective impact initiative transitioned in response to the community. We end the article with ten takeaways and an invitation for higher education administrators to identify their own learning and action steps that can help shift focus from proving to improving their institution’s value to the community

The structural role of the core literature in history

The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory. Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e. communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one, by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one, by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal articles, acts mostly locally

Ready and Able: Addressing Labor Market Needs and Building Productive Careers for People with Disabilities through Collaborative Approaches

The report describes market-driven practices that increase hiring, retention, promotion and accommodation of people with disabilities through partnerships with employers.Approaches profiled in the research include: collaborations between major national employers and public sector agencies; models that focus on an industry or occupational sector; private and "alternative" staffing services that place people with disabilities; partnerships that expand opportunities for college students and graduates with disabilities; and local and regional hubs that connect people with disabilities and employers. The research also profiles two organizations where lead disability and employment partnerships act as catalysts

Networks, Urban

For much of the twentieth century, urban networks was a term used by sociologists and others to describe social networks, their importance for bonding within communities and bridging between communities, and their relationship to the geographical mobility implied by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urbanization, mid-twentieth-century suburbanization, and late-twentieth-century globalization. This relationship is often assumed to be one in which social networks are threatened by geographical mobility. From sometime in the 1980s, in a context of globalization, network became a metaphor used across the social sciences to describe how people, ideas, and objects flow between nodes in a globalizing world, and urban networks became a term used by geographers and others to describe at least four more or less connected things: (1) archipelagos of world or global cities, in which centrality depends on networks of producer services and information and communications technology infrastructure; (2) this information and communications technology infrastructure, among other networked infrastructure, which has become unbundled in recent years, leading to fragmented or splintered cities; (3) other smaller networks of humans and nonhumans – actor networks – that help to maintain urban life; and (4) twenty-first-century social networks, characterized by their transnational geographies and relatively high levels of institutionalization and self-consciousnes