Sources of social capital

In order to better understand the elements that act to create social capital, I thought it would be useful to study instances where groups have performed exceptionally well. A great reference for this is a book called "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration," by Patricia Ward Biederman. The book is a study of the circumstances under which groups of individuals ("Great Groups" as she calls them) achieve exceptional results, and ends with an attempt to draw out common factors. Some of those factors are:

• Great groups and great leaders create each other;
• Every great group has a strong leader;
• Great groups are full of talented people who can work together;
• Great groups see themselves as winning underdogs;
• Great groups always have an enemy;
• In great groups the right person has the right job;
• Great work is its own reward.

Now, these factors were derived from a study on creativity. If we were to extract the essence of what they convey, we could see that there are some common elements between these and the factors that act to create social capital. For instance, that great groups see themselves as winning underdogs and that they have an enemy indicates a common goal, an overarching mission to which all members are devoted. Great groups also exhibit order: every member has a well-defined role, an indication that social order is also a crucial factor is extracting maximum gains from a group's members. Also playing to this idea is the necessity of a strong leader, which can be reinterpreted as a need for this structure to have an "alpha", a figurehead around which (or whom) the group's efforts are organized.

In our class discussion, I've been a big proponent that social capital is an emergent phenomenon, something that happens spontaneously as a result of our human proclivity for association. I resisted the possibility that it could be created from the top by an authority. In fact, upon reflection, I think it depends on the unit of analysis. While I still don't think a government can form social capital by an act of will, I do think that it can, as a leader would for a smaller group, set a favourable stage where it can occur naturally.

The question still remains: Can social capital accrue without the intervention of a leader? To this, my answer is that it cannot. For all the reasons I have elaborated until now, I don't think humans can coordinate their efforts without some basic, elementary structure. This structure can sometimes be completely fortuitous, a result of circumstance, but this alone would not be enough. A group will still need to organize itself around a common objective, and this common objective will not live by itself, it will need to be embodied in a leader.

Creating social capital: The issue of scale

The most important point of clarification I would like to add to our dicsussion on the origins of social capital deals with the issue scale: What is the size of the group being studied? When we talk about the top-down formation of social capital, we are often referring to an entity of some authority which enables association by either establishing a framework of rights and privilieges, or simply by being the embodiment of the group’s aspirations. In this scenario, would the father in a patriarchal society be deemed the "top" of the family unit, granting privilieges and facilitating the functioning of the family unit? Would a pastor be deemed the "top" of a congregation? If a leader is necessary for the formation of social capital, how do we define the leader?

I'm someone who understands things best by thinking of them from a fundamental perspective. When speaking of human relationships in terms of fundamentals, you have to look to anthropology and the origins of the human proclivity for socialization. Evolution doesn't allow for the existence of complex adaptations if they're not fundamental to the survival of an organism. The rich palette of emotions that humans have evolved is one such fundamentally necessary adaptation, and that's because forming social ties is a matter of survival for humans. Where other social animals congregate to leverage the security of large groups, humans do so as a matter of identity. Casual observation shows that humans will seek acceptance and affiliation wherever they can, and the means they have to navigate these complex social waters is the rich set of emotions and behaviours they have evolved over the millenia.

What does all this mean to our class on social capital? Well, along with this proclivity for social association comes a need for social order. How many expressions are there to the effect that "too many cooks spoil the broth," or "too many chiefs and too few indians"? These expressions describe undesirable situations where a lack of order or direction affect a group's performance. What I believe this indicates is that, in addition to affiliation or belonging, humans also need order. We need to know where we stand. I've lived through experiences where groups of individuals who do not know one another and where a hierarchy did not exist from the outset go through a phase of jostling: individuals jockey for position, and tensions are apparent until every member has found his/her post. For these and many other reasons, I believe that the formation of social capital requires an act of leadership, even if only symbolic, to prepare the group for further synergistic gains.