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

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

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

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)

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

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

Black and Asian police officers and support staff: prejudice, identity, agency and social cohesion

This primary research paper presents a review of research that finds that the British Government’s new social cohesion agenda does hold promise for racial and ethnic prejudice reduction – but that social cohesion policies and practice must include at their core policies to reduce institutional racism in British police services. Analysis of the literature reveals that considerably more research is required to examine the precise nature and dynamics of institutional racism within the police services. There is a need to understand how racism against Black and minority ethnic (BME) police employees, and police racism against BME communities, influences social cohesion. That this is important, given the British government’s current social cohesion policy agenda, is patently clear. Considerably more research is about to be undertaken in this area by the authors of this paper and the results will be published in the academic press, disseminated at conferences and presented in training programmes

Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth

We present evidence that measures of “social cohesion,” such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn casually determines growth.Political institutions, social cohesion, poverty, economic policy