Connect With Your Calling

This blog was written by Major Ethan Frizzell of The Salvation Army.

Social capital (like human capital and even physical capital) is not a single, uni-dimensional variable. Rather, there are many forms of social capital, and different forms have different consequences.

• bonding social capital (that is, links among people who are like one an- other) is important for “getting by,”
• bridging social capital (that is, links among people who are unlike one another) is crucial for “getting ahead,”
• linking social capital (that is, vertical links to people in positions of authority) plays a special role in development and poverty alleviation.

Let us build social capital together.

There are many kinds of social capital: [3]

• financial – Money available for investment Real estate, equipment, and/or infrastructure
• physical – Training that increases productivity on the job
• human – Relationships of trust embedded in social networks
• cultural – High cultural knowledge that can be turned to the owner’s socioeconomic advantage

Social capital is recognized as an individual and a collective property.  Many researchers take it for granted that social capital is collective, but most social surveys implicitly measure social capital at the individual level.[4]  Here is the ideal-typical situation in which individuals discover and use social capital: a group of people become connected via a certain kind of relations, and regardless of the exact nature of their relations, the members find that something possessed or produced by the group either itself is a valuable asset or can help them acquire other desirable benefits.

Three things in this situation are recognized as social capital, which overlap on top of each other: [5]

• group membership
• features of the relationship
• resources under the control of the group or dependent on the existence of the group.

At the core of social capital is trust with three crucial elements:[6]

• Repeat exposure to others tends to lead to greater confidence that others can be trusted (assuming that parties respect conditions 2 and 3 below);
• The parties are honest in their communications; and
• The parties follow through on the commitments they make.

Individual social capital is defined by three dimensions: [7]

• the (number of) connections in the individual social network
• the resources these connections give access to
• the availability of these resources from alters to the individual, of which the willingness of alters is a major component.

On this basis, we define an individual’s social capital here as: [8]

The collection of resources owned by the members of an individual’s personal social network, which may become available to the individual as a result of the history of these relationships.  

Connect with Your Calling is found in connections, in networks that bring forth relationships that make the whole community stronger.