Schooling and Social Capital in Diverse Cultures

INTRODUCTION: SCAFFOLDS FOR ACHIEVEMENT? INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF

SOCIAL CAPITAL
Bruce FullerEmily Hannum
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 INTRODUCTION: SCAFFOLDS FOR
ACHIEVEMENT? INSTITUTIONAL
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FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

Bruce Fuller and Emily Hannum

Reformers around the world - eager to raise children's learning and the effec-
tiveness of public education - are tinkering again with the mechanics of schools.
Disappointing and unequal levels of achievement are attributed to dynamics
inside the walls of classrooms: teachers must be unenthused or short on skills;
class sizes are too big; student testing is too infrequent; the old didactic methods
of phonics must be restored, as teenage students forever enjoy the wonder of
inventive spelling.
The counter thesis is that families and communities matter more when it
comes to raising children and motivating them to engage teachers and schools.
Indeed, a student's social-class background and neighborhood attributes remain
the strongest predictors of achievement, not school factors, as the late James
S. Coleman first detailed with such controversy 35 years ago.

GRASPING SOCIAL CAPITAL,

UNDERSTANDING ITS SUDDEN RISE
But what is it about a family's class position or the dynamics of a child's
immediate community that so powerfully draws the learning curves of children?

Schooling and Social Capital in Diverse Cultures, Volume 13, pages 1-12.
Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISBN: 0-7623-0817-6

1
 2 BRUCE FULLER AND EMILY HANNUM

And how are we to explain the unexpectedly high levels of achievement among
youth who face high barriers to schooling, such as from working-class Chinese-
American kids to youngsters of poor Latino parents?
Prior structural representations of modern societies as made up of all-
determining layer cakes have given way to more localized illumination of
parenting practices, peer norms, and ethnic-rooted values that may operate
within small communities, at times insulated from the overall class structure or
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the conserving habits of the state.

Social capital has risen in meteoric fashion, offering an umbrella that shelters a
bundle of local dynamics, to help explain the mechanisms behind the curtain
of class reproduction, as well as individual exceptionalism when it comes to
youngsters who get ahead. While its meaning connotes forms of trust, reciprocity,
and social expectations about membership in a group, the construct of social
capital remains defined in rudimentary ways, rife with contradictions and
conceptual dead ends. Nonetheless, notable scholars and political commentators
have sanctified social capital in recent years as the door through which intellectual
nirvana is to be found. Certainly, it holds promise for illuminating- and revisiting
- local forces that shape children's engagement with and capacity to succeed
inside schools.
In sketching the initial elements of social capital, Professor Coleman, along
with Barbara Schneider, empirically linked the family's social structure, expec-
tations, and press on children to achieve with their actual school performance
(Coleman, 1990; Schneider & Coleman, 1993). Pushing this line forward, each
chapter in the present volume demonstrates how elements within the social
capital frame do illuminate the local actors, norms, and expectations that force-
fully shape children's success in school - from families to peer groups, from
Vietnamese and Latino communities in North America, to social networks in
Kenya or formal channels in Israel that bear on youngsters' performance inside
the institution of schooling. The authors and commentators in this volume
express widely varying allegiance to the social capital construct.
Before digging deeper into how the elements of social capital account for
unequal levels of school achievement, we press to define what is meant by
social capital and why the construct itself has gained so much legitimacy in
the space of a decade, undergoing rapid institutionalization in its own right.
Well over a century ago, Karl Marx, then later Emile Durkheim, detailed the
benefits of robust group ties and the alienating effects of losing one's sense of
membership. And 15 years ago Pierre Bourdieu (1985, p. 249) already was
writing of "profits which accrue from membership in a group" (see Portes, 1998,
for review). So why has social capital, born again, taken hold now in the post-
industrial era? And if social capital is so bankable, fungible, and powerful, how
 Introduction: Scaffolds for Achievement? 3

can children or teachers tap into it to advance youngsters' engagement with the
school community?
Beyond the erosion of structural accounts of individual attainment, two
additional forces help to explain the sudden ascendance of the social capital
idea. First is the widespread concern felt in many corners of society that
civility is on the decline, as well as the worry that the pursuit of a common
good is being eclipsed by tribal and parochial interests. The culture wars
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continue, marked by divisive issues like abortion, immigration and language,

gender and ethnic-linked rights, and what children are to learn inside schools.
In his comparative analysis of trust within Western societies, Francis
Fukuyama (1995, p. 308) issued this sweeping claim: "The moral communities
that made up American civil society at mid-century, from the family to neigh-
borhoods to churches to work places have been under assault, and a number of
indicators suggest that the degree of general sociability has declined." Robert
Putnam's (1993) more scholarly study of civil society and village associations
in Italy led to the same claim about decline over time, and he argued that local
civic organizations struggle to sustain deeper participation and shared social
commitments, relative to the atomistic North American society. He even gen-
erated maps to display U.S. states that are allegedly high on social capital and
those that fall to the bottom of the pack. This has sparked an empirical debate
over how scholars can validly gauge social properties like trust, reciprocity, a
collective press on children to follow particular pathways (Ladd, 1999). But the
fact remains that some nations in the Western sphere are becoming more
fractured within, separated by gross inequalities in income, ethnic diversity,
views of women's roles, even contention about what comprises life and
mankind's legitimacy in interfering with it.
The question of civil society's health and moral integrity holds direct
implications for the cultural organization of schooling, starting with how we think
about the "proper ways" of raising children. Historically, the upbringing of kids
has unfolded in private spaces filled with particular norms about what children
should learn, the forms of adult authority and power that surround socialization,
and how young children acquire knowledge and values inside and outside class-
rooms. Since the eighteenth century, a public set of authorities and political
mechanisms have come to organize the agenda of schools, and children now
spend more years of their lives in publicly-regulated places of learning.
The very reproduction and strength of civil society depends on a broad
consensus about the right agenda for public schools in modern society. So,
when fissures begin to appear in civil society, with trust and a feeling of common
cause dissolving like sand through one's fingers, the enterprise of schooling
begins to fracture as well. Witness the growing interest in home
 4 BRUCE FULLER AND EMILY HANNUM

schooling, vouchers, privatizing the management of failing schools, and publicly

financed charter schools (Fuller, 2000).
This brings us to the remaining force that contributes to social capital's
remarkable reification: the eagerness of influential scholars to craft a theory of
individual decision making that is nested in local groups, drawing on skepticism
of big institutions and disaffection with the ability of liberal-rights philosophy
(its social-political, not its market, features) to combat the centrifugal forces
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that beset many western societies. We begin this short story with Coleman's
radical recasting of the original notion of social capital advanced by economist
Glenn Loury.

REINVENTING SOCIAL CAPITAL

Professor Loury, in his obscure 1977 book chapter, started with the macro struc-
ture of labor in the United States, what he saw as a highly institutionalized
arrangement of workers segmented along lines of race and class. This segmen-
tation, according to Loury, held damning implications for young blacks entering
the labor force: "The social structure of this economy may exhibit both racial
and income stratification... (including the form) of their informal social
contacts" (Loury, 1977, pp. 157-158). Loury emphasized "the role played by
group processes" (p. 156), citing the marxist economist, Samuel Bowles, in
determining young adults' knowledge of and access to particular layers of the
job market.
Under Loury's analysis education played a key, and similarly stratified, role.
Rather than viewing employers as discriminatory actors, the reproduction of
inequality was rooted in how particular communities experience variable access
to schooling, "by which he or she acquires marketable skills." For this reason
"group differences in the supply of market-valued characteristics will tend to
persist" (p. 154). Loury's aim was to link the ordered destinations of individual
youth to a higher level of social or labor organization. One such local mecha-
nism briefly mentioned at the end of the chapter: "It may be useful to employ
a concept of social capital to represent the consequence of social position in
facilitating acquisition of the standard human capital characteristics" (p. 176).
For fellow economists, this was radical stuff. "The creation of a skilled work-
force is a social process." And the individual's eventual stream of earnings
to some extent "are accounted for by social forces outside an individual's
control" (p. 175).
Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues, of course, had elaborated a theory of cultural
capital in the 1970s, placing schools in the pivotal position of sanctifying certain
forms of high cultural knowledge, embedded within the highly stratified
 Introduction: Scaffolds for Achievement? 5

arrangements of educational organizations found in European and North

American societies (Bourdieu & Passerson, 1977). But Loury's formulation
simply linked racially segmented communities to differential access to schools
and to the availability of adult networks that hold quite different kinds of infor-
mation and marketable skills, systematically reproducing advantage and
disadvantage in the labor force. This was no longer a stream of thought in crit-
ical cultural studies. Loury's primitive conception of social capital, instead, was
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fungible in more ways than one, fitting nicely into North American scholars'
pragmatic and materialist frame. And this construct, rooted in stratified insti-
tutions and local social networks, was now being championed by an economist.
Professor Coleman, after the social capital idea percolated in academic circles
for a decade, seized the moment. In 1988 he published a pioneering article
entitled, "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital." Although the direct
ancestry of Coleman's rendition of the idea is abundantly clear, Coleman did
not cite Loury until publishing his massive Foundations of Social Theory two
years later. Coleman was intent on developing a individual-focused theory of
motivation and action: "If we begin with a theory of rational action, in which
each actor has control over certain resources and interests and events, then
social capital constitutes a particular kind of resource available to an actor"
(S98). For Coleman, the individual is still trying to maximize his or her utility.
Yet social capital also is out there in a social space, a resource "defined by its
function" (S98) and somewhat situationally bounded that can be accumulated
and appropriated. "Unlike other forms of capital, social capital inheres in the
structure of relations between actors and among actors." In a series of examples
Coleman went on to illuminate aspects of "obligation, expectations, and trust-
worthiness of structures" (SI02) that characterize small-scale markets, political
groups, and families.
On the one hand, Coleman postulated that the types and intensity of this
"resource" called social capital were locally bounded: "Like physical capital
and human capital, social capital is not completely fungible but may be specific
to certain activities. A given form of social capital that is valuable in facilitating
certain actions may be useless or even harmful for others" (S98). On the other
hand, Coleman assumed that the form and effects of social capital were similar
across large institutions. In his 1988 paper, for instance, he tried to show that
comparatively high levels of social capital were reproduced and somehow
allocated to children within Catholic schools, contributing to achievement
significantly more than could be uncovered in public schools.
Coleman's eagerness to find a fungible form of capital, sustained in one
network and exercised in another, retains a philosophical focus on the sover-
eign individual. He ironically fused an economist's construction of capital
 6 BRUCE FULLER AND EMILY HANNUM

with a distinctly pragmatic conception of psychology and motivation. For the

likes of William James and even John Dewey, "culture is an individual
acquirement; it is the name for a set of products, practices, and perspectives
of which individuals can avail themselves" (Menand, 2001, p. 407, emphasis
added). The person's choices across a plurality of social options can only be
considered if "individual human beings (are conceived), not as partial aspects
of greater metaphysical wholes, but as complete in themselves, free to enter
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into relations as they choose" (p. 407). But if social capital is embedded in
formal organizations, such as Catholic schools, and tighter closure inside
particular cults reinforces this social grist, how can we assume that the indi-
vidual and his or her volition will remain so salient in this theory of human
motivation, as Coleman would have it?
Portes (1998) emphasizes a similar problem with Coleman's pragmatic
conception of social capital. It centered on its utility and fungibility for the
individual recipient. But what motivates the web of actors - be they individuals
or institutions - who donate social capital to human-scale networks? In general,
we have little empirical knowledge of who produces social capital and within
what social networks and institutions, as Schaub and Baker emphasize in their
commentary. This includes teachers, high school coaches, and members of
school councils. They spend day in and day out contributing to local norms
and expectations for children's achievement and mobility, often by building
trust through asymmetrical, not reciprocating, relations.
Certainly "the altruistic dispositions of donors (of social capital) may be
bounded by the limits of their community" (Portes, 1998, p. 8). But can altruism
be explained by individualistic conceptions of exchange or reciprocity? Do all
those nuns in Coleman's parochial schools believe that they are making deposits
of social capital in students' accounts and some day their graduates will return
the favor?

BRINGING SOCIAL CAPITAL TO

ISSUES OF SCHOOLING
The chapters in the present volume advance our understanding of three slip-
pery issues related to the social capital idea. Do the webs of trust, shared
commitments, and reciprocity that comprise social capital reside in culturally
bounded communities - from ethnic enclaves to peer groups - or can deposits
of social capital be accumulated across communities? What role do formal
institutions, such as schools, play in producing and sustaining social capital?
Is social capital a touchable resource that is rationally drawn down by the
individual who is pursuing particular interests? Or is social capital a social
 Introduction: Scaffolds for Achievement? 7

web that socializes individuals in taken-for-granted ways, built'upon trust,

behavioral scripts, and normative encouragement? In addition, our contributors
speak directly to an issue that sharply separate Putnam and Coleman. For
Putnam social capital is an account of how group solidarity and institution
building may unfold. But for Coleman the ideals of social capital express faith
in neoclassical formulations of rational choice and the local group's efficacy
in enforcing its conserving tendencies and sacrasanct norms. Our contributors
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and commentators return to this question of whether formal institutions or

indigenous networks host deposits of enabling kinds of social capital.
Indeed, Putnam's (2000) well known application of social capital brings
into focus a pivotal issue that is so central to the future of public schooling
and child development. His characterization of social capital, at first, resem-
bles Coleman's: "familiarity, tolerance, solidarity, trust, habits of cooperation,
and mutual respect" (p. 362). But rather than linking the social capital resource
to a neoclassical individual, as Coleman would have it, Putnam goes macro,
arguing that societies with more aggregate social capital manifest greater
levels of civic engagement and a richer mix of intermediate, human-scale
organizations that produce and sustain this social resource. Whereas Coleman
(1990, p. 652) worried that public institutions were eroding highly localized
or "primordial social capital," Putnam remains optimistic that the state and
other institutions can stimulate voluntary and nonprofit organizations at the
grassroots.
The institution of schooling is a ripe site for illuminating the sources and
uses of social capital, and for arbitrating between the contradictions that have
arisen in this young literature. We have long known that differing local
communities - and forms of parenting - contribute tangible scaffolds which
support children's learning and socialization inside schools. The chapters that
follow shine a bright light on such elements of social capital - informal
and institutional - that operate in diverse ethnic settings. Schools are
organizations, under the logic of modernity, that aim to build non-local forms
of trust, social obligation, and human capital. And individual rights come
into play in terms of equalizing simple access to formalized social networks
(institutions). But the socializing and skilling function of schooling reflects
a pivotal intermediary process - mediating between local norms and the
modern agenda of the nation-state. In recent years, reformers who have pushed
radically decentralized forms of schooling, like charter schools, are trying to
recreate the village organization that was more tightly coupled to local norms,
to village-level forms of social capital if you will. But will this dynamic truly
advance, or simply segment and stratify, forms of opportunity for students, as
commentator Patricia Fernandez Kelly asks so forcefully?
 8 BRUCE FULLER AND EMILY HANNUM

HOW DOES SOCIAL CAPITAL ADVANCE

CHILDREN'S LEARNING?
Our contributors are inventively tapping into the social capital frame to under-
stand the underlying causes of children's often mediocre and persistently
unequal levels of school achievement. Each chapter offers a fresh viewpoint in
advancing our understanding of how social networks outside and inside the
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school institution construct scaffolds for youngsters' motivation and supports

for their learning.
The settings and problems addressed in this volume are wonderfully varied,
and the empirical investigations are revealing. Carl Bankston and Min Zhou
begin by questioning Coleman's thesis that Asian children in North America
do well in school because there is tight closure and family-reinforced norms
inside their networks. Instead, these authors focus on the role played by formal,
human-scale institutions - particularly local churches - in advancing social
capital that is related to school achievement. Kimberly Goyette and Gilberto
Conchas bolster this line of analysis, shedding a bright light on how peer groups
and teachers, for Latino and Vietnamese-American children, contribute to
learning trajectories, seemingly independent of social dynamics inside the
nuclear family. Grace Kao moves the analysis back inside families, moving to
broader empirical ground by using national survey data to understand one facet
now placed under the social capital umbrella: educational aspirations held by
ethnic-minority parents for their children.
The final two chapters move us outside North America to examine the inter-
play between social supports felt by children and youth and the arrangement
of formal institutions. Claudia Buchmann looks comprehensively at how the
cultural form of schooling in Kenya variably maps onto the language and social
norms that operate in particularly families. In addition, some families can invest
in after-school tutorial programs ("shadow education"), which contributes further
to the cultural capital that's so influential in driving up school achievement.
Finally, Shavit, Ayalon, and Kurlaender examine how second-chance schools in
Israel offer formal supports - and material mobility - for many offspring of
working-class families. These authors do not explicitly draw from a social capital
frame. But the small-scale organizations that they describe operate outside
networks that provide limited social capital for these youths when it comes
to education-powered mobility. This bolsters Fernandez Kelly's argument,
amplified in her commentary, that most pivotal sources of social capital for many
youths may spring from institutions, not from their insular networks.
We asked three commentators to review these original papers. Critical reviews
by Maryellen Schaub and David Baker, Patricia Fernandez Kelly, and Raymond
 Introduction: Scaffolds for Achievement? 9

Wong follow chapters or pairs of chapters. They help to set this new empirical
work in the wider context of the application of the social capital construct to
issues of schooling and student achievement.
All this fresh research prompts the crucial question: Are we making collec-
tive progress in building theory? Does the social capital construct buy us much
in how we understand the role played by actors - inside and outside the school
- in building stronger scaffolds for children's learning and their motivated
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engagement in the school itself? Figure 1 offers one framework for seeing how
our contributors offer pieces for the theory-building puzzle.
A well-developed account of how social capital contributes to children's
learning and socialization would include a clear logic and empirical findings
within each of these cells. That is, we would want to know about the life cycle
of social capital in the lives of children and youth. What actors create and
sustain the key elements of social capital, be it trust, strong norms, enforced
expectations, or reciprocity? How is social capital drawn down inside commu-
nities and by whom? If deposits are made, who withdraws quantities of social
capital? Is it expended by recipients or depleted by donors as networks break
apart?
At the same time, a clear account of social capital's contribution would more
thickly describe where to find it, the character and content of expectations or
norms, and how embedded - taken for granted or contested in a cultural sense
- the stuff of social capital really is within particular settings. One way to
dissect this dimension is to think about social capital's location or situational
bounds. And how are the elements signaled to children? Coleman and others
have talked of sanctions and clear messages in close-knit networks. But we
have little ethnographic evidence to substantiate such mechanisms within the
social capital framework. And another cultural issue arises; is social capital
reproduced and exercised in tacit or quite self-conscious ways?

Life cycle of social network > >

Creating Sustaining and Drawing down,
reproducing expending
Character and
organizational Location or situation
embedded-
ness Media and signaling

Actors and intentionality

Fig. 1. Social Capital Theory Building.

 10 BRUCE FULLER AND EMILY HANNUM

Social capital proponents have largely ducked this issue of actors and
their level of intentionality. There is certainly a romantic attraction to
human-scale communities that advance norms and positive expectations
in taken-for-granted ways. We see it in Putnam's affection for civic life in
Italy, and Coleman's recurring seduction with the heart of Catholic schools.
But tacitness and closure are powerful elements of gangs, peer groups that
blast high achieving black children for "acting white," and teacher cliques
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that resist innovation and change inside schools. This is why formal orga-
nizations - from school boards to neighborhood agencies - formulate goals,
reforms, and policy "interventions." If the indigenous construction of social
capital is so splendid, why is mobility out of poverty via school attainment
still so rare? This volume's final chapter returns to the issue of whether
social capital offers new tools for understanding the reproduction of
inequality and stratification.

VALUE-ADDED BY SOCIAL CAPITAL?

DRAWING FROM CLOSE CONCEPTUAL COUSINS

Certain chapters also examine elements now included in the social capital box
that have a history all their own, including the study of parents' educational
aspirations and the social networking effects of schools. This prompts the
question of what related facets of social support or normative pressures within
local communities are to be put into, or remain outside, the social capital frame-
work? The construct has become so popular - a reified artifact of trust among
social analysts - it's adhering to all sorts of other constructs and social forces.
But what is the distinct value-added from building a theory of social capital
linked to the children's development and the effects of formal schooling?
It is worrisome that so many scholars - smitten by the social capital bug
- either jettison neighboring theoretical frames or obsess on a particular
element, like the radical idea of trust, losing sight of the broader social
architecture that sustains it. Similarly, Alexander and Smelser (1999) argue
that Putnam's broad claims about the erosion of civil society, evidenced by
the decline in some voluntary organizations, ignore the dramatic rise of
nonprofit firms and community action agencies that run all sorts of public
services. More broadly, they emphasize that micro social organizations - family,
church, and community groups - have long reinforced social roles and scripted
norms for individuals. The explanatory problem rests at this local institutional
level: how to strengthen intermediate collectives to enrich membership while
sustaining a pluralistic range of organizations to ensure inclusion and civil
 Introduction: Scaffolds for Achievement? 11

dialogue across groups (Cohen, 1999). In the absence of variety among and
within neighborhoods, social capital networks could become limiting and
encrusted in parochial pockets.
Moving down to informal networks, we run the risk of ignoring established
accounts of how individuals and small groups experience pressing norms,
expectations, and rules for trust or reciprocity. From Emile Durkheim through
the past three generations of cultural scholars, the reproduction of taken-for-
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granted routines or scripts has been a central focus of study (e.g. Goffman,
1959; Holland & Quinn, 1987; Collins, 1994). Coleman's neoclassical rendition
of social capital assumes, instead, a more rational individual reflecting on and
extracting situational norms. Yet in the schooling arena, family-institution
conceptions of parent and child action have assumed families' express varying
levels of consciousness and contestation around dominant norms (e.g. Fuller
& Liang, 1999). The pivotal issue of agency and tacitness, including how
institutions create norms and individuals internalize some of them, has been
investigated in the cultural capital arena since the work of Antonio Gramsci,
amplified by Paul DiMaggio and in the work of Annette Lareau, replete with
rich descriptions of how cultural capital is drawn upon by parents and teachers
alike to include or exclude certain kids (Lareau & Horvat, 1999). In our faith-
filled rush to become members of the social capital camp, scholars are losing
track of these earlier theoretical developments.
As you read the chapters that follow, the distinct advantages of the social
capital frame will certainly shine through. It's an elastic bundle of constructs
- expectations, cultural bonds, expressions of trust and reciprocal support -
that illuminate how membership and situational norms come to vary in strength.
The frame holds enormous promise for explaining group differences in
achievement and how school organizations can become more resourceful hosts
of social capital. The local, post-structural positioning of the framework also
allows us to better understand how certain children beat the odds, responding
to particular supports in particular human-scale settings. Overall, you will see
in these chapters how the constituent elements of social capital operate within
and outside schools, and how this new knowledge invites educators and
community agencies to bolster their own stock of this social glue.
Still, in reading these papers you may be struck by the fact that the idea
and the ideals inherent in social capital remain works in progress, especially
their applications to child development and schooling. The discrete actors
and forces within networks often remain hazy, unclearly operationalized and
observed. Abstract sketches of its basic architecture often hide what lays inside,
especially how norms, trust, and expectations are actually felt by children who
benefit from, and are starved for, social capital. And finally, the logic and
 12 BRUCE FULLER AND EMILY HANNUM

causal pathways by which the substance of social capital influences children's

learning and motivation too often remain unspecified, empirically unexamined.
The sudden excitement around social capital is reminiscent of the hoola-hoop
craze of the 1960s. The novel motion is seductive. The effect is exhilarating.
But explaining what's going on and how to improve these delighting effects is
proving to be more challenging.
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Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Beverly Hills:
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Cohen, J. (1999). Does Voluntary Association Make Democracy Work? In: N. Smelser &
J. Alexander (Eds), Diversity and Its Discontents (pp. 263-293). Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Coleman, J. (1988). Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of Sociology,
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Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
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