Networks and Communities

People are social animals, and they live in groups. These social groups form coherent units that enable individuals to live and flourish. Of course there are many ways of organizing social groups, and these have become more complex over time. Nevertheless, the basic insight of network theory and the idea of community is that the organization of social groups enables people to flourish more completely.

The idea is that the stock of social bonds, networks, and patterns of association help people in many ways, such as providing support or information. When these stocks of bonds are added together societies can operate more efficiently in that many social ills are corrected automatically. Moreover, governments can intervene by relying on citizens cooperating, sorting themselves in ways that are constructive, and providing support for each other. In this way, societies with these bonds and networks achieve collective ends much more easily than do societies without them.

The ideas of supportive networks and community-based collective action are attractive, so it is no surprise that they have been revived in recent years with the large amount of work on what is often called social capital—for example, Robert Putnam's 2000 work, Bowling Alone. The problem is tying down a concept so notoriously slippery that it is hard to know what it measures and that is so flexible in usage that its utility in social analysis is problematic.

The key problem is definition. Are we talking about networks, in which case the power comes from how efficiently people are joined up, how they may exchange information so as to signal cooperation, thus helping to overcome the collective action problem? Lots of problems in society have this characteristic—people collectively want to get to a certain outcome, but just do not know [Page 447]what other people are going to do. Consider a street on which the residents have the option of recycling their waste. People put their recycled waste into boxes for collection, but they know that if no one else does this, their own efforts will be pretty pointless. So how do the residents act collectively? The existing social network allows each actor to signal to the others how he or she will act, so that people can put out their recyclables in this knowledge. Of course, this must be a supportive network that allows people to trust each other. In that sense, some writers on this topic, for instance Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer, suggest that trust should be the important ingredient—in exchanges with each other, we should not treat each other as knaves, for if we do we will never be able to come to an agreement to buy and sell. Some kind of trust is necessary for most kinds of social interactions to arise, though it is not clear whether it should be a generalized kind of trust (what is called social trust) or a particular sort tailored for a particular context. Some researchers, such as Putnam, think that associational membership is the key, with participation in associations creating the networks that foster effective public action and better policy outcomes. Partly because of the ambiguity of definition, academics have been very skeptical as to whether social capital is a meaningful concept at all and whether the data support the claims being made (see Jackman & Miller, 2004). Nonetheless, as noted by David Halpern, there is an accumulation of studies across many fields that show that these measures are associated with higher performance in the form of better government actions, and various desirable policy outcomes like lower crime, better health, and more prosperous economies. The results demonstrate that many forms of social networks and other forms of reciprocation have benefits for wider society.

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