Social Capital

This morning we walked over to the University of Bologna for our 2nd lecture day, where we spent the morning with Professor Zamagni and then the afternoon with Professor Flavio Delbono in the Department of Economics. It was a pleasant walk as the sun was finally out today! It had been raining and cold since we arrived on Saturday.

This is now our third day with Stefano as we had the opportunity to have him visit us in Vancouver during one of our two orientation days in Vancouver last week. There has been a lot a theory that he has been lecturing about and it’s all now starting to come together, which is very exciting and motivating as our group is really engaged in the co-operative system in Emilia Romagna and how and what we can implement into our systems.

The part of the lecture that really struck out for me today was Stefano’s piece on “Social Capital,” that was made famous by Putnam in 1993 in his book “Making democracy Work.” He said there were three types of Social Capital through Bonding, Bridging, and Linking. Bonding is set through interpersonal relations such as a family/clan. A good example of this is the Mafia, where it is engrained that they can only trust their family. Bridging is belonging to different communities where you trust everyone inherently, however, if they do something to break your trust then at that point you can stop trusting them. A good example was given by Stefano of when he went to open a new bank account with his wife in a bank in London. He was used to giving letters of references and other documents to a bank in Italy when he opened his bank account, however, in London they didn’t ask for anything and within 5 minutes he had a new account, thus the bank was bridging social capital by trusting their clients right away. Stefano then described Linking as linking the political society (such as government) with the business community and the civil society (ie. the not-for-profits) where they would co-operate among themselves permanently, not just when required. They would have a mutual trust right away between them all.

Going back to the Mafia in Southern Italy, they have too much Bonding Social Capital and not enough Bridging and this has lead the south of Italy to its financial and social problems. Too much Bonding can be detrimental. I thought it was interesting to hear Stefano say that if we want to help stop from having too much Bonding, then we need to push for more bridging. And I was even more intrigued when he said that at Vancity we don’t do enough Linking. I agree with Stefano and I think we are really good at bridging, but we don’t do enough of the linking. We have so much opportunity to create linkages between the political society, our for-profit-members and not-for-profit members. Vancity as a co-operative can create this Social Partnership in our community as we are trusted and respected unlike some other capitalistic firms. I think this is exactly where Community Investment can play a role in our proof of concept strategy.

How can you in your role create linkages to generate social capital in your community? How do you think Vancity can create these linkages?