This paper reviews the origins and definitions of social capital in the writings of Bourdieu, Loury, and Coleman, among other authors. It distinguishes four sources of social capital and examines their dynamics. Applications of the concept in the sociological literature emphasize its role in social control, in family support, and in benefits mediated by extrafamilial networks. I provide examples of each of these positive functions. Negative consequences of the same processes also deserve attention for a balanced picture of the forces at play. I review four such consequences and illustrate them with relevant examples. Recent writings on social capital have extended the concept from an individual asset to a feature of communities and even nations. The final sections describe this conceptual stretch and examine its limitations. I argue that, as shorthand for the positive consequences of sociability, social capital has a definite place in sociological theory. However, excessive extensions of the concept may j...

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Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

▪ Abstract Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide array of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources or reactions to stress-inducing conditions by both the children themselves and their parents. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels, including both family and neighborhood. Its effects are moderated by children's own characteristics, family characteristics, and external support systems.

Socioeconomic status and child development.

MUELLER, CHARLES W., and PARCEL, TOBY L. Measures of Socioeconomic Status: Alternatives and Recommendations. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 13-30. In this paper we argue that it is ill-advised to use impressionistic or outdated measures of SES in psychological research. After we critique such inappropriate measures, 2 occupation-based measures, the Duncan Socioeconomic Index and the Siegel Prestige Scale, are recommended as the best measures of the SES of individuals or household heads. Another strategy is described for measuring household or family SES where the household characteristics and composition vary.

Measures of socioeconomic status: Alternatives and recommendations.

This article evaluates the impact of parental working conditions on both a cognitive child outcome and a social one among a national sample of three- to six-year-old children with employed mothers. Current maternal working conditions (i.e., a mother's working conditions at the time of the study) affect verbal facility, but paternal work hours in the early years have significant effects on children's behavior problems. Mother's current occupational complexity interacts with her resources and employment characteristics to influence both cognitive and social outcomes. The conclusion is that adequate parental resources contribute to the forms of family social capital useful in facilitating positive child outcomes, but that conclusions regarding negative effects of maternal work in the child's first year have been overgeneralized.

Early parental work, family social capital, and early childhood outcomes

We study the impact of homeowning on the cognitive and behavioral outcomes of children. Using four waves of a comprehensive national panel data set, we control for many social, demographic and economic variables previously found to influence child outcomes. The data are a panel, allowing us to control for unobserved household– and child–specific factors. We use a treatment effects model to address the issue of possible sample selection bias caused by unobserved variables that influence both the parent’s choice of whether to own or rent and whether to invest in their children. We find that owning a home compared with renting leads to a 13 to 23% higher quality home environment, greater cognitive ability and fewer child behavior problems. For children living in owned homes, math achievement is up to 9% higher, reading achievement is up to 7% higher, and children’s behavioral problems are 1 to 3% lower.

Does Homeownership Affect Child Outcomes

We investigate the effects of both family and school capital on student math and reading achievement. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) merged Child-Mother Data for 1992 and 1994, to which indicators of capital in the children's schools for 1993-94 and 1994-95 have recently been added. We study children who attended first through eighth grades in both 1992 and 1994, with samples of 2034 for math achievement and 2203 for reading recognition. Findings suggest that school capital effects are modest in size while family capital effects are stronger ; combinations of school and family capital boost or modify additive findings. We sketch directions for future research and discuss the usefulness of analyzing school and family capital as parallel concepts

Capital at Home and at School: Effects on Student Achievement

Parents' Jobs and Children's Lives considers the effects of parental working conditions on children's cognition and social development. It also investigates how parental work affects the home environments that parents create for their children, and how these home environments influence the children directly. The theoretical underpinnings of the book draw from both sociology and economics; in addition, the authors make use of literature derived from developmental psychology. Theoretically eclectic, they rely on the personality and social structure framework developed by Melvin Kohn and his colleagues, on arguments regarding the importance of family social capital developed by James Coleman, as well as on ideas from Gary Becker's "new home economics" as guides to model specification. The empirical basis for Parcel and Menaghan's study is a series of multivariate analyses using data drawn from the 1986 and 1988 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey's Child-Mother data set. This data set matches longitudinal data on mothers, derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, with data on the children of these mothers born as of 1986. Children aged 3 to 6 were given age-appropriate developmental assessments every two years in order to assess the influence of parental work on short-term changes in their cognition and social behavior. The authors also devote considerable attention to the effects of fathers' work and family structure on the well-being of their children. Parcel and Menaghan's work brings evidence to bear on both the theoretical perspectives guiding the analyses and on current policy debates regarding the nexus of work and family.

Toby L. Parcel

Papers

Measures of socioeconomic status: Alternatives and recommendations.

Early parental work, family social capital, and early childhood outcomes

Does Homeownership Affect Child Outcomes

Capital at Home and at School: Effects on Student Achievement

Parents' jobs and children's lives