Recently, I had a talk with a catholic priest about
people’s participation at the Mass. Not surprisingly, he told me about the
continuously declining numbers of participants, but he was more worried about
the decreasing level of general social participation in his parish. As a matter
of fact he pointed out the additional problems of recruiting or retaining
members of various parish-related associations like charities, youth, hiking or
card playing groups. In his opinion this phenomenon was not basically a question
of religious faith, but mainly one of individualism. As people want to take
their lives in their own hands and like to organize more and more aspects of
their lives individually, they make ever less use of the parish’s social
offerings. Again, this is not a new insight, as Robert Putnam (2000) described
in his seminal work “Bowling Alone” various aspects of the American community
(political, civic and religious participation, workplace connections etc.) and
its decreasing level of social activity or, as he named it, social capital.
I am asking myself what the consequences of this
shrinking in social capital are for people’s willingness to participate in
collective actions regarding social issues. Let’s take the steadily increasing
disparity of incomes and wealth in most of the Western countries as an example:
“We are the 99 percent” is one of the corresponding “Occupy”-movement’s
slogans. But why are those 99 percent not able to trigger any societal change
regarding fairness in the dissemination of income and wealth? “No, we can’t!”
seems to be the more adequate slogan.
I think that individualism is part of the problem. If
people are striving for their own personal goals, they are not really organized
regarding the pooling of shared interests in the context of a social issue.
Further, people’s membership in and their feeling to belong to associations,
unions and other social groups fosters the development and maintaining of
shared values, norms and interests in the context of a social issue. Therefore,
not only personal relationships, but also memberships in social groups lead to
ties that bind among people.
One possibility to approach a social issue is a
stakeholder network. Especially regarding complex social issues for which
cooperation among the affected actors is needed to create sustainable
solutions, stakeholder networks are a promising organizational form. However,
even if stakeholder networks have proved their potential to create value
regarding a complex focal social issue, they are no panacea. Stakeholder
networks depend heavily on the knowledge and skills of the different
stakeholders’ representatives participating in the problem-solving regarding
the focal issue at hand. Therefore, through the interactions of representatives
in a stakeholder network, the corresponding shared values, norms, and interests
regarding the social issue are emerging. These personal interactions, in the
sense of people for people, are important for creating sustainable solutions in
complex issue-based stakeholder networks.
Stakeholder networks and its organizational form
create social capital by supporting two different kinds of ties that bind. On
the one hand, there are the already mentioned interactions among
representatives of different stakeholders. On the other hand, shared values,
norms and interests provide the social glue among individuals. This glue is
needed to address complex social issues like the increasing disparity of
incomes and wealth.
Tom
Schneider
No comments:
Post a Comment