推动与促进:家庭资本对青年农民非农就业行为的影响机制探析

家庭资本是个人拥有的一种嵌入在家庭关系中的先赋性资源,它在青年非农就业中的作用可区分为推动和促进两种机制。本文使用全国抽样调查数据,分析了农村青年的家庭资本对其非农就业行为的影响机制。统计结果发现,家庭的社会资本、文化资本和经济资本对青年非农就业行为均具有明显的推动作用,家庭社会资本和文化资本对青年非农就业水平的提升无明显影响,而家庭经济资本对非农就业水平具有显著促进作用。文章最后进一步讨论了这些发现的启示性内涵。     

Targeting State Aid To Distressed Rural Communities

Recent rural economic problems have prompted some states totarget economic development assistance to distressed rural areas.The most common way to target these programs has been to allocateaid based on unemployment rates. This may be a questionablepractice, however, because the unemployment rate is a poor indicatorof economic difficulty in many rural areas. This article assessesthe strengths and weaknesses of alternative economic, social,and fiscal indicators that are available for allocating aidto distressed rural communities. It concludes with some specificsuggestions for improving the effectiveness of state aid fordistressed rural areas. Background information is provided concerningrural economic and fiscal difficulties in the 1980s and recentstate initiatives.     

Peasant federations and rural development policies in the Andes

This chapter focuses on a special type of structural social capital embedded in second-tier indigenous peasant federations in the Andean countries. It first examines the manifestations of this social capital and then goes on to analyze the strategies of the various social actors for its use, mainly to further the interests of poor and oppressed members, but often in the service of broader societal or narrower partisan purposes. Cases are presented to illustrate how such a social capital resource, once created, can be used or transformed for other than the original purposes. Sometimes these spillovers are socially beneficial, confirming the mutability thesis of Hirschman (1984); but in other cases the diversions can be harmful and disempowering. The authors conclude that even considering these varied uses, meso-level peasant federations, when incorporated into rural development policies, can help to achieve equity and sustainability.     

Social Capital and Regional Economies in Britain

Is social capital a prerequisite for prosperity? This paper analyzes social capital and economic performance in the British regions. Like Italy, Britain has a north–south economic divide. Are these differences caused by unequal stocks of social capital? This paper provides limited support for the hypothesized relationship between some indicators of social capital (especially trust and civic associations) and economic performance. Economic associations, however, are negatively correlated. This highlights shortcomings in social capital theory in terms of transferring the concept to new settings, the mechanisms linking social capital to production and the translation of social capital into public policy.     

Theory to Practice: Policy Recommendations for Fostering Economic Development through Social Capital

Proponents of social capital theory have long argued not only that it is in the best interest of civic life to build social capital but also that social capital is vital for the economic health of communities. This has been confirmed by recent research showing that social capital, especially in its bridging form, is positively associated with job creation at the metropolitan statistical area level. At the same time, social capital is often viewed as something either inherent or absent within a community. This article takes on that assumption by presenting a policy‐based approach to developing social capital. It provides two theoretical explanations for how social capital affects economic development and identifies four lessons for economic development practitioners to use to enhance social capital. These research‐based recommendations for economic development practitioners and policy makers seek to improve the social capital and, consequently, the economic development of their community.     

Social capital and the revitalization of New York City's distressed inner‐city housing

Abstract

This article presents evidence that social capital can be an effective component of locally sponsored low‐income housing programs. It provides a model for measuring social capital at the building level, where it may be most effective in improving housing quality and security. The study compares five programs in New York City that house the city's poorest, mostly minority residents. The surveys from 487 buildings in Brooklyn, NY, were analyzed to compare the success of programs in maintaining and revitalizing landlord‐abandoned buildings taken by the city in lieu of taxes.

Results of the analysis demonstrate that the positive effects of tenant ownership were largely mediated by the higher levels of social capital found in these buildings. These levels have implications for the survival and economic advancement of poor households and civic participation in poor communities. The study suggests the value of alternative homeownership programs.     

The utility of bonding social capital

Abstract

In most studies of social capital, bridging social capital is emphasized as ‘good’ for democracy and economic performance. It is rarer to find studies showing that bonding social capital can bring positive effects. Mostly, bonding social capital is either overlooked or depicted as the ‘villain’ that leads to ethnic conflict, intolerant behaviour and poor economic and democratic development. In this article, it is argued that this picture needs to be revised. If we assume that bonding trust is a negative force for development and democracy, we ignore a substantial portion of the political history of the West. Also, new empirical evidence from India suggests that bonding social capital is related to good governance. High levels of bonding trust cannot only facilitate political cooperation. They may also work as a shield against public sector employees who attempt to exploit citizens in a corrupt or clientelistic manner. The conclusion drawn in the article is that the view of social capital as a prime mover with inherent normatively attractive qualities should give way to a perspective where social capital is more properly regarded as an intermediate variable where the way it is combined with, or interacts with, other factors determines outcomes.     

The World Bank and social capital: Lessons from ten rural development projects in the Philippines and Mexico

Social capital is widely recognized as one of the few sources of capital available to the poor, yet the processes by which development policies affect the accumulation of that social capital are not well understood. The World Bank, through its funding of development projects, affects the institutional environments for the accumulation of such social capital. The question is how to determine whether that institutional context is enabling, and to what degree. This paper compares ten recent World Bank-funded rural development projects in Mexico and the Philippines to explore how the processes of project design and implementation influence the institutional environments for the accumulation of horizontal, vertical, and intersectoral forms of pro-poor social capital. The findings have conceptual and policy implications for understanding the political dynamics of creating enabling environments for social capital accumulation by the poor.     

The transportation-credit mortgage: a post-mortem

Abstract

Over the past decade, public housing has become the nation's “housing of last resort.” This article examines the emergence of this social role and describes the conditions of resident economic and social distress that have accompanied it. In this context, the article also evaluates the problem assessment and recommendations of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, which released its final report in August 1992. This evaluation is used as the basis for proposing a new social role for public housing defined around the concept of social capital.

The commission correctly identified concentrations of resident distress, such as high proportions of extremely poor and female‐headed families, as a major problem facing distressed public housing. However, the recommendations of the commission were much less satisfying. Rather than confronting directly the tenant selection policies that have produced these aggregations of resident distress, the commission held to an unrealistic optimism that social services and economic development initiatives could relieve these conditions. For changes in public housing tenant selection policies to occur, an alternative social role for public housing must be defined. Under this alternative role, a primary objective of the public housing program would be to give residents access to social capital. Such an approach would ensure that families of the working poor are integrated with the nonworking poor in public housing developments, thereby fostering those sinews of community connection and trust the essential features of social capital and the sources of hope and opportunity.     

Does social capital increase public support for economic globalisation?

The dominant explanation of public attitudes vis‐à‐vis economic globalisation focuses on re‐distributional implications, with an emphasis on factor endowments and government‐sponsored safety nets (the compensation hypothesis). The empirical implication of these theoretical arguments is that in advanced economies, on which this article focuses, individuals endowed with less human and financial capital will be more likely to experience income losses. Hence they will oppose economic openness unless they are compensated by the government. It is argued here that including social capital in the analysis can fill two gaps in explanations relying on factor endowments and the compensation hypothesis. First, generalised trust – one key aspect of social capital – constitutes a personal endowment alongside human and financial capital. Second, structural social capital – another key aspect of social capital – can be regarded as a nongovernmental social safety net that can compensate for endowment‐related disadvantages of individuals. Both aspects of social capital are expected to contribute, for distinct reasons, to more positive views on economic openness. The empirical testing relies on survey data for two countries: Switzerland and the United States. For both countries, the results indicate that generalised trust has a strong, positive effect on public opinion of economic globalisation, whereas structural social capital has no effect.     

Reviving Social Rights in Latin America: The Potential Role of International Human Rights Documents

Social rights are essential to our ability to fully participate in society. In Latin America, these rights are increasingly marginalized as neoliberal policies take hold. At the same time, the related concepts of civil society and social capital are often incorporated into strategies aimed at alleviating the problems of the Latin American poor. It is expected that by strengthening people's civic capacity, their sense of mutual responsibility and ability to self-provide certain services will be enhanced. In the context of the current policy environment, however, such strategies are unlikely to be entirely successful. Lack of economic resources may preclude the Latin American poor from effective civic participation. More importantly, the promotion of civil society and social capital on the part of aid agencies and governments may represent an implicit threat to social rights, in as much as the organizations advocated are not likely to actively struggle for expansion of rights. Nevertheless, human rights documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child provide a base upon which rights-based movements can be constructed.     

Both glue and lubricant: Transnational ethnic social capital as a source of Asia-Pacific subregionalism

Social capital not only forms and functions at the individual, group, and organizational levels, but also permeates and transcends the political and geographic boundaries of nation-states. This paper examines transnational ethnic social networks based on ancestral and kinship ties as a form of social capital that facilitates economic growth and transformation in a transborder subregional context. Transnational ethnic social capital works by gluing multiple economic actors on opposite sides of a border together and by lubricating economic transactions among them. When purposefully mobilized by government policies, transnational ethnic social capital in turn induces more responsive and efficient policy initiatives and implementation. This paper also considers whether ethnic social capital is both a necessary and sufficient condition for successful transnational subregionalism by demonstrating its interaction with certain crucial complementary or contradictory factors.     

The development of small-scale irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa

The performance of irrigation schemes in sub-Saharan Africa has generally been discouraging. This has been particularly true of large-scale formal smallholder developments. Recently attention has been turning increasingly to small-scale farmer-managed irrigation, generally utilizing simple, low-cost methods of water control. While not yet very prominent in Government planning and policy statements, small-scale irrigation has been espoused enthusiastically by farmers, non-governmental organizations and some international agencies. In this approach to rural development external agencies act as catalysts of change, technical advisors, channels for capital funding and intermediaries between farmer groups and other organizations. Although generally limited in physical size and sophistication of technology, small-scale irrigation nevertheless experiences the complexities inherent in the management of land and water, and of social, political and economic change. Research and development needs are wide-ranging, and attention to them is likely to be fruitful in terms of increasingly effective rural development strategies.     

A Tale of Two Towns: Assessing the Role of Political Resources in a Community Electronic Network

In this study we examine responses to the recent expansion of information technology in two rural Minnesota towns. One of these towns took a cooperative approach to technology access, developing a community electronic network, while the other town relied on a more individualistic, entrepreneurial model. The present study examines citizens' attitudes concerning social, political, and technological issues in these two communities, with the goal of uncovering what kinds of attitudes and resources citizens need to have in order to help support and sustain a community electronic network. Structural equation modeling is used to specify the relationships among individuals' economic, political, and social resources, technology ownership and use, and awareness of and support for the community network. Drawing on a theory of social capital, we consider the relative importance of privately- oriented social engagement versus publicly- oriented political engagement in relation to collective outcomes. Our analysis shows that in the town with the broadly- based community electronic network, individuals' political as well as economic resources are linked to knowledge and use of computer resources, whereas in the comparison community, economic stratification alone drives computer access. The implications of these findings for issues of equity, access to technology, and the development of strong community ties are discussed.     

Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.     

关系特质与社会支持——以北京市城市贫困家庭为例

本文考察了城市贫困家庭社会网络的关系特质与其提供的社会支持内容之间的关系。研究发现:在城市贫困家庭的社会关系网络中,家庭经济条件较好者更倾向于提供经济方面的支持,职业声望较高者更倾向于提供就业和经济方面的支持;见面频度与所有支持项目都有显著关系,即见面频度越高,提供支持的可能性越大;在关系类型方面,亲属,特别是近亲,是城市贫困家庭获取多种社会支持的最主要来源。     

Introduction: Social Capital in Scandinavia

In this special issue of Scandinavian Political Studies it is explored how the concept of social capital relates to the Scandinavian context. It is common knowledge that Scandinavia performs well with regard to many aspects of social capital, such as the level of trust and the density of membership in voluntary associations. Contrary to developments in the United States, there is little evidence of a decline in social capital in Scandinavia. There are thus several reasons why Scandinavia offers an especially interesting testing ground for many of the hypotheses and problems generated by social capital theory. What kind of empirical evidence do we have for the changes of social capital in Scandinavia? If high levels of social capital are indeed an important attribute of Scandinavian society, how can such high levels be maintained? What is the relation between, on the one hand, social capital in the form of norms about reciprocity and, on the other hand, the Social Democratic type of encompassing and universal welfare state? Is there something special about the types of mechanisms that are behind the abundance and maintenance of social capital in Scandinavia? It is argued that the high level of social capital in the Scandinavian countries can be explained by (a) the high degree of economic equality, (b) the low level of patronage and corruption and (c) the predominance of universal non‐discriminating welfare programmes.     

Local effects of the new land rush: How capital inflows transformed rural Russia

Rising global prices for agricultural commodities have led to the inflow of capital to rural economies and to transfers of land ownership to new agricultural operators (NAOs) in developing and post‐Soviet countries. How capital inflows affect rural communities is often explained with the variable of institutional strength, an explanation aligned with the good governance approach to economic development: Capital inflows have positive developmental effects, if strong domestic institutions vet land deals and regulate NAOs. Contra the focus on institutional parameters as exogenous variables, this article highlights the role of political projects in shaping local outcomes and driving institutional change. Evolving political priorities are important to understand domestic rural transformations because they lead to interventions that privilege some actors as agents of change, while others are sidelined—hence transforming local economies. This theoretical suggestion is based on a study of Russia's rural transformation that followed a significant influx of capital.     

The post-migration sexual citizenship of Latino gay men in Canada

The Cuéntame! study interviewed 25 Spanish-speaking gay and bisexual men in Toronto. Their migration experiences are traversed by economic rationales, security concerns and the embodied experiences of race, gender, culture and sexuality. Most express narratives of empowered opportunity in distancing themselves from restrictive sexual regimes of their place of origin, but at the same time, many migrants trade a new sense of social acceptance as gay for marginalized statuses defined by diminished social and economic capital. The social participatory rights of citizenship are particularly affected by sexuality and social class. The need and desire to establish social and sexual connections in a new environment often characterized by economic vulnerability shape experiences of social capital and citizenship rights.     

宁夏城乡二元社会保障法律制度的现状与问题分析

中国的二元经济结构,导致了包括宁夏在内全国实行城乡二元社会保障法律体系。目前,宁夏农村社会保障体系建设仍然滞后于城镇社会保险体系。农村居民的社会保障水平不高。宁夏城镇居民的社会保险、社会救济、社会福利和社会优抚安置已经建立了相对完善的体制和制度。可是在农村,上述基本社会保障体制和制度仍在积极探索和完善中,城乡社会保障工作还存在相当大的差距。