Education and Social Cohesion: Re-Centering the Debate

Social Capital theory has tended to treat social cohesion as a mere aggregation of individual and community level characteristics, ignoring the long tradition of theory on social solidarity and social cohesion at the societal level. However, the key indicators of social capital – associational membership and social trust – do not co-vary cross nationally and societies rich in community level social capital are not always cohesive societies. Social capital and societal cohesion are not necessarily the same thing and education may have different effects on each. This article seeks to put the analysis of education and societal cohesion back in the centre of the picture. We do this firstly through a critical review of some of the existing literature on education and social capital which points to the limitations of individual level analysis of what are fundamentally societal issues. Secondly, we outline some alternative models for understanding how education impacts on social cohesion in different societies, drawing on an analysis of some of the aggregated cross-national data on skills, income distribution and various indicators of social cohesion. The argument suggests some causal mechanisms for the social impacts of education that are quite different from those which normally underpin arguments about human and social capital

How to make social cohesion work. Bertelsmann Stiftung Speech 2019

The megatrends of globalization and digitalization pose challenges for social cohesion. Many people are concerned about their economic future, and right-wing populists are leveraging the internet to spread oversimplified messages and fuel fears. Thought leaders from around the world convened to discuss the future of social cohesion at the Bertelsmann Stiftung‘s international “Trying Times” conference addressing the issue “Rethinking Social Cohesion” that was held in Berlin from September 4–6, 2019. In his closing speech titled “How to make social cohesion work,” Canadian author and President Emeritus of PEN International John Ralston Saul demonstrated that empathy, respect for difference and the willingness to accept the complexity of society rather than exclusion and fear are the factors that pave the way toward a successful future. The social cohesion of the future needs both diversity and community. Read his speech in full here

Social Cohesion in Germany 2017. Bertelsmann Stiftung Study. English Summary

Despite all the dire predictions, Germany continues to exhibit a high level of social cohesion. Even the country’s growing cultural and religious diversity is not at odds with its degree of togetherness. Yet, there are clear indications of potential threats: for example, the generally perceived lack of social justice and the gaping cleavage in togetherness between east and west as well as between structurally weak regions and such that are flourishing. To that end, cohesion is much weaker in Germany’s eastern federal states than its western ones. The federal states with the highest levels of cohesion are Saarland, Baden-Württemberg, and Bavaria. These are the core findings from the Social Cohesion Radar (SCR), for which Bertelsmann Stiftung collected fresh data in 2017 by surveying more than 5,000 people throughout the country. The goal was to examine cohesion in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, causes, and effects. For this empirical study, social cohesion is defined as the quality of communal life and is viewed as a multidimensional phenomenon. High levels of cohesion result from strong social relations, a positive feeling of connectedness to the community, and a strong focus on the common good

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

Examining the Relationship Between Social Cohesion and Health in Kensington

This quantitative cross-sectional survey study was conducted in collaboration with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC) to improve our understanding of the role of social cohesion in the Somerset neighborhood. Its aims were to help guide future efforts to improve the health of this community by considering whether social factors might contribute to overall health. In previous studies, social cohesion has been hypothesized to be related to overall self-reported health. In this study we examined the nature and strength of this relationship in a low socio-economic status population in Kensington. We used linear regression to evaluate cross-sectional survey data collected from 328 neighborhood residents. Data was collected on health information, social cohesion, demographic factors, health behaviors, and financial stability. Variables that were significantly associated with self-reported health were included in a multiple regression model to examine the relationship between social cohesion and self-reported health. Our findings were that social cohesion and overall health were related. We also found that stress was significantly associated with social cohesion as well as overall health; while the reach of this study stops short of being able to identify the causality of these relationships, organizations such as NKCDC could combine the strength of the relationships with their expertise in the relevant population to better inform their future programming. This study also revealed a number of areas that could be worthy of future study, including the importance of collective efficacy in improving population health and the effect of social cohesion on people’s health over the course of a longitudinal study

Triangles to Capture Social Cohesion

Although community detection has drawn tremendous amount of attention across the sciences in the past decades, no formal consensus has been reached on the very nature of what qualifies a community as such. In this article we take an orthogonal approach by introducing a novel point of view to the problem of overlapping communities. Instead of quantifying the quality of a set of communities, we choose to focus on the intrinsic community-ness of one given set of nodes. To do so, we propose a general metric on graphs, the cohesion, based on counting triangles and inspired by well established sociological considerations. The model has been validated through a large-scale online experiment called Fellows in which users were able to compute their social groups on Face- book and rate the quality of the obtained groups. By observing those ratings in relation to the cohesion we assess that the cohesion is a strong indicator of users subjective perception of the community-ness of a set of people

Globalism,transformation and social cohesion. Bertelsmann Stiftung Interview 2019

Globalization and the changes it brings pose challenges for social cohesion. Uncertainty is growing as many people are concerned about their economic future, social inequality and growing diversity in societies as a result of global migration. At the “Trying Times” conference addressing the issue “Rethinking Social Cohesion” hosted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Berlin from September 4-6 in 2019, thought leaders from around the world convened to discuss the future of social cohesion. Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change, gave the keynote speech at the High-Level Round Table kicking off the conference. In his speech “Globalisation, Transformation and Social Cohesion,” he discussed the effects of globalization and its potential in shaping the future. In the following interview, he explores various aspects of his argument in further detail and emphasizes the key pillars of strengthening social cohesion in the future: demonstrating solidarity with others and rediscovering our own capacity for action

Employment and Social Cohesion

The EU is striving to create growth and jobs through a multilateral approach. In particular, measures improving the competitiveness of our economies, stimulating innovation and productivity and strengthening the marginal incentives to work are considered. At the same time, EU energy policies are a sustainable way of creating jobs and enhancing growth and are hence a part of the solution to the current economic crisis. However, is to be stressed, the longer-term goal remains the building of Europe’s future prosperity on the basis of a knowledge (cognition) economy.knowledge based society; social cohesion; employment; quality of life, European Social Fund (ESF)

Measuring and validating social cohesion: a bottom-up approach

The aim of this paper is to provide a synthetic macro index of social cohesion based on the observation of several individual level variables. Based on the definition of social cohesion by Bernard (1999) and Chan et al. (2006) an index of social cohesion (henceforth VALCOS Index) was created. It covers the political and sociocultural domains of life in their formal and substantial relations. Results suggest that the VALCOS-Index of social cohesion is strongly and significantly correlated with other macro indicators largely used by the scientific community. The aggregation of EVS 2008 data on social cohesion together with many macro indicators of several dimensions of social life (including economic, socio-demographic, health and subjective well-being indicators) allowed us to rank social cohesion across 39 European countries and to explore differences across groups of countries. Subsequently, we validated our index by correlating it with many national level variables.social cohesion; methodology; macro index; micro index; EVS