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 Where Putnams best-selling Bowling Alone (2000) presented a largely dismal rationale for why Americans vote, associate and volunteer in decreasing numbers, Better Together provides a hopeful portrait of social-capital building in large and small communities across the U.S. The critical importance of social capital which Putnam defines as networks and norms of trust, reciprocity and civic engagement to community success and socio-economic progress was the central theme of his earlier book, Making Democracy Work (1992), and remains a preoccupation of his ongoing research. The product of intensive field research on the characteristics of effective community organizing in contemporary America, Better Together includes ten in-depth case studies (refreshingly presented in the form of stories) from which it extracts a number of valuable lessons in organizing people for significant civic gains.
Robert Putnam is a professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government, and Lewis Feldstein is president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.
Most apparent in the authors selected cases is the fact that social-capital formation is easier in smaller groups, where trust, communication and empathy are more lithely established and sustained. Smaller groups, Better Together asserts, work better in part because they can be more homogeneous than large gatherings; participants have more shared assumptions and easier tacit communication. Beyond that, the more extensive interchange that is possible in smaller groups makes it possible to discover unexpected mutuality even in the face of difference (p. 276). Small groups of similar people with like experiences, Putnam et al. observe, benefit from bonding social capital.
But small, homogeneous groups typically are limited in the resources they can mobilize and the things they can accomplish. Consequently, the authors introduce another kind of social capital bridging social capital that facilitates the enhancements in power and influence that naturally accompany large-scale action. Not surprisingly, bridging social capital is harder to form, in large part because it requires people to confront dissimilarity. Better Together documents that communities overcome this problem by forming alliances among smaller groups with compatible interests: One clear solution is federation: nesting small groups within larger groups. Small groups within larger organizations can foster the personal relationships that would not be so easily formed within the larger organization alone (p. 278). This observation suggests an organizing strategy requiring bridging among autonomous cells through one or more common members. It also implies the need to search for commonality where it may not be immediately apparentfor example, shared experiences based on age, socio-economic status or place of residence.
A third lesson concerns the means by which people discover these necessary commonalities. The challenge of locating areas of common interest, the authors assert, may be overcome through the simple but powerful medium of storytelling. Initial bonding among dissimilar people is achieved through personal narrativesaccounts of individual experiences in the community. Later, after a base of collective action has been accumulated, connections are sustained through the recounting of shared experiences. These latter stories often chronicle conflict or struggle between a cohesive we and an identifiable enemy, or they. (Just as often, however, cohesion can be forged by mutual action to solve a problem that is not directly identifiable with any opposing group or interest.)
Thus, a fourth lesson is that organizing, in practice, is a process of reorganizingrecycling existing friendships and relationships to form new networks for social action. Likewise, through its various stories, Better Together demonstrates that success breeds success, with each civic victory building group confidence (and competence) for taking on the next challenge. This phenomenon has important implications for group sustainability, particularly as initial members move on and are succeeded by newcomers with evolving agendas.
A fifth and final lesson to be drawn from the stories of grassroots action contained in Better Together is that government, often, is a necessary partner. While the civic gains described in the book were driven by local activism, they frequently were facilitated by public policies and the support of entrepreneurial public officials, who ordinarily eschew involvement in enterprises that promise gains only in the long term.
The subject matter and settings of the ten case studies are compelling and diverse: empowering poor border communities in Texas; bridging a socio-economic chasm through the arts in Portsmouth, N.H.; revitalizing a burned-out inner-city neighborhood in Boston, Mass.; building community through faith amid the exurban sprawl of Southern California; developing youth leadership and civic participation among school-age children in Wisconsin (and nationwide); organizing labor by building community among clerical and technical workers at Harvard University; harnessing the knowledge and experience of seniors to improve inner-city school performance in Philadelphia; confronting inter-ethnic and intergenerational workforce conflict at United Parcel Service; pushing the community-building potential of the Internet in San Francisco; and giving neighborhood organizations a formal, structured voice in city policymaking in Portland, Oregon.
Written with precision, clarity and evident affection, this insightful book is an important contribution to both scholarship and popular literature on the elusive topic of social participation.
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