You read here a basic outline of the definition of social capital, and this page provided more depth. Below is an explanation of the various forms of social capital.

Human beings are tied to one another in a great variety of ways. We are family and kin, friends and neighbors, co-workers to colleagues in our occupations; we are members of the same religious, ethnic, linguistic, or racial communities. Just as there are many forms of human bonds, there are many forms of social capital.

These different forms of social capital can be defined and evaluated by organizations so that they can evaluate their social impact at multiple levels:

Internal community: the relationship between employees within or between different programs or departments

Program community: between the organization and its customers or clients

Larger community: Between the organization and the larger community (for organizations attempting to revitalize communities)

The first step toward assessing and expanding an organization's social capital impact is to understand these different types of social capital, what types of human relationships correspond to each, and their relative trade-offs. Organizational members can then decide which social capital goals are consistent with their mission, and begin to understand how the services, activities, and events they provide to the community in turn build social capital through strengthened interpersonal ties.

The discussion that follows briefly outlines the key types and aspects of interpersonal ties that programs might work to strengthen. Programs should focus on evaluating both the ties they directly create and the indirect effects that interventions have on the larger social networks and community participation of the people who come into contact with it. Here, we focus on four aspects of social networks that we label: closeness, bridging, formality, and locus.

Note: These four aspects hardly exhaust a characterization of social capital.

CLOSENESS: HOW STRONG ARE THE TIES?

Strongest ties: Most of our strongest ties are rooted in intimate attachments based on kinship or affection: our families and close friends. These ties provide us with basic emotional support and are the people to whom we likely turn to discuss important, private personal issues. The absence or dysfunction of such ties is the root problem that many programmatic interventions try to address, including programs serving youth, family services programs, mental health services, and so on. These programs may provide counseling and treatment to individuals and families in an attempt to repair strong ties, or may seek to replace absent ties with meaningful substitutes, such as mentors or foster care families. They often pursue these strategies since the absence of strong ties is highly associated with broader social problems, like crime or delinquency. These ties are often the foundation upon which other social networks are based. Therefore, while the evaluation of these programs should emphasize measures of tie strength, they should also seek evidence of broader network formation and social participation.

Weaker ties: As we expand our circle of friends and acquaintances, our ties become weaker and less rooted in affection. Many of these so-called weak ties are almost purely instrumental: a potential customer, a source of job leads, and so on. Most of our ties lie somewhere between these two extremes-people we like may also be useful to us. The usefulness (or efficacy) of ties may be a central concern in program evaluation. To take an obvious example, a job-training program may teach participants to network for job leads. If the social networks of participants are insular - all or most of their social connections have similar job-related information or are also unemployed - the network is unlikely to uncover opportunities. Such networks can provide emotional support and even information on coping strategies, but they are unlikely to produce a job. In this case, a person "rich in friends" might wish that at least some of his or her friends were rich(er) financially. Similar scenarios can be constructed for many other topics and for many types of resources, ranging from information to emotional and even financial support.

What jobless clients need to help them in their job search, of course, is a wide and diverse network of friends, acquaintances, and contacts. What has been called the "strength of weak ties" by sociologist Mark Granovetter¹ is their power to connect us to a much broader range of society's resources than our strong ties, which are often dominated by kin or those like us. An individual with a healthy set of networks will have, on the one hand, strong ties that provide her with a sense of belonging as well as emotional and even financial support, as well as a large and diverse set of weak ties, on the other hand, that link her to a wide variety of social and economic circles.

Professional and Public Helpers. A special class of connections comprise a part of our basic personal support network, but without especially strong ties or high levels of affect. These are our ties to professional helpers, such as doctors or counselors, and public helpers, such as police officers, teachers, and those who staff community-based organizations, including volunteers. Access to these sources of personal support balances and complements the help that we can get from family and friends. Since these professional and public helpers staff the programs we want to evaluate, these relationships are central to program evaluation.

The public helpers may be important links to parts of the local and larger community to which the client/participant is poorly tied. Perhaps more important, the quality of the tie between helpers and helped may be the key to whether a particular program is effective. For example, teachers may only be able to teach effectively when parents, students, and teachers trust and respect each other. Finally, helpers may be the ones who educate people about the importance of social capital in their lives.

BRIDGING AND BONDING TIES: WHICH ARE KEY TO YOUR ORGANIZATION?

Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, makes a distinction between bonding social capital and bridging social capital.

Bonding social capital: social networks that connect you with people like you (similar race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, or religion). Bonding social capital is easier to create - this is captured by the folk maxim, "birds of a feather flock together". Stronger bonds are especially necessary when the members of the community are asked to make sacrifices for the collective good, or the community needs to speak in one voice. Stronger ties form a more solid basis for the rewards of affection and emotional support. They also make it easier for the community as a whole to enforce norms of behavior and participation through social pressure. It is important to note that the individuals so bonded may not actually know one another. If they were to meet, however, the bond could be a strong basis upon which to build a trusting relationship, for example college alumni from different classes meeting for the first time. The sense of community that these strangers feel is a key resource that the organizations and communities to which they belong can tap into, and extends the range of each individual's personal networks.

Bridging Social Capital: Social networks that help you forge relationships across major class cleavages (race, ethnicity, class, religion) are "bridging" ties. Although bridging ties are more difficult to build, and this difficulty is further exacerbated by our residential segregation, these ties can be invaluable in building community, increasing tolerance, and improving information flows. First bridging ties enhance community by easing tension across sub-groups, by creating a sense of "we-ness" rather than an "us vs. them" mentality. For community organizations that wish to foster a sense of solidarity in a neighborhood, town, or city, this contradiction is all too real. Such divisions can be rooted in racial, gender, age, ethnic, or class differences. When the different sub-groups comprising a community share few ties, they are unlikely to trust each other, and therefore, unlikely to cooperate to achieve common goals or to help and support one another in neighborly ways. As a result, the community itself and all its members are less likely to be safe, politically powerful, or prosperous. Second, bridging social capital can especially useful in dispelling stereotypes and increasing tolerance. Third, bridging social capital can be critical in importing useful resources (like political clout, economic assistance, etc.) into more economically troubled neighborhoods. Finally, bridging ties (by exposing us to a wider diversity of people), provide us with access to more divergent information, and thus improve information flows and our choices.

FORMALITY: ARE COMMUNITY MEMBERS INTERACTING FORMALLY OR CASUALLY?

Some of our ties are much more formal, for example when we join or form voluntary associations for private or civic purposes, and others are very informal, such as a group of neighborhood regulars who meet often at a local pub. This dimension, like others, is a continuum: at the most informal end of this spectrum are loose-knit groups of friends; at the most formal end are organizations with strict membership requirements and well-documented memberships. The formal groups are "well-bounded" - that is, we know who is a member and who isn't. Friendship networks are usually more open and fluid, if they are not, a friendship circle is a clique. Naturally, the two forms interact: many informal ties are extensions of shared memberships and vice versa. In assessing social capital, within organizations and communities, we have to be sensitive to the role that informal socializing plays within more structured associations. How varied are the types of contacts among individuals within the group? If contacts are limited (say, to formal meetings), this may also limit opportunities for unrelated but important exchange of information, the formation of new friendships, or the launching of new cooperative ventures.

For three reasons, community organizations may be interested in the types of associations that community residents join and the civic activities these associations undertake:

1. Mobilizing and strengthening community associations may be central to an organization's mission and vision of community building. Some voluntary associations are explicitly and primarily public-minded and are organized for the purposes of charity, community representation, and community organizing, e.g. putting together a parade or a crime watch group.

2. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religiously-affiliated organizations are a potential source of support, volunteer manpower, and partnership for a variety of activities.

3. Many groups that exist for essentially private reasons, from business groups to softball teams, engage in ancillary community service and may provide volunteers and other resources.

Understanding associational ties is especially helpful if building stronger ties between program participants and their communities is an important program goal. Even if it is not, some assessment of civic engagement is a necessary part of the broader measure of the social capital of program participants. (See "Evaluation Design".)

Finally, community organizations may be interested in the membership activities of the community as a whole. Such a general measure is the proper measure for programs designed to have broad community impact. In addition, for more narrowly targeted programs, the degree of voluntary association may be used for comparison purposes as part of a general measure of community social capital. (Again, see "Evaluation Design.")

LOCUS: WHERE IS OUR SOCIAL CAPITAL?

A final crosscutting dimension, and one with tremendous practical significance, concerns the spatial distribution of social networks.

In measuring social capital, locus is important for a number of reasons. Because our web of social networks ranges far beyond the communities in which we live, it would be wrong to equate the stock of social capital in a place with any individual resident's access to social capital. Non-local ties of community members represent both a benefit and a cost for the local community: a benefit because they bridge to other communities; and a cost because they represent a degree of detachment from the community.

Place is important, too, because most programs and organizations serve communities of place, and because most of our problems remain geographically-rooted: crime, poor education, drug abuse, etc. If the social ties of a community or program participants (to name only two groups) are mainly to distant outsiders but not to neighbors, it is all the harder to mobilize collective action. Since World War II, in particular, the spheres of our lives (work, school, family, friends, and neighborhood) have become increasingly separated geographically, especially for the highly mobile and suburbanized middle classes. In addition, a smaller but potentially critical subset of business and intellectual elites have adopted more cosmopolitan lifestyles, and are only loosely attached to specific places.

A healthy community of place would balance the costs and benefits of non-local ties; it would be comprised of capable individuals who can bring resources of the outside world into the neighborhood while remaining attached and committed to their local community. Since we will assess community social capital by talking to individuals about their own experiences, we will have to keep track of the role of place for each person.

Many adults personally embrace the benefits of a more individualistic lifestyle where they can pick and choose social relationships less determined by who their neighbors are. Nevertheless, as adults living in communities, we collectively lament the cumulative impact of these individualistic choices when there is a loss of a geographic sense of community. These tensions are less true for parents of children, since their social world is often heavily comprised of others in their school and neighborhood (both of which are generally geographically rooted), and parents' ties to the community are increased through their childrens' ties.

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1. Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360-1380.