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The great pioneer of the study of community on the potential fallout from coronavirus

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Washington Post - Researchers identify social factors inoculating some communities against coronavirus

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Washington Post - Researchers identify social factors inoculating some communities against coronavirus

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/11/social-capital-covid-spread/

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'Functions of social capital – bonding' (2018) by Tristan Claridge

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'Functions of social capital – bonding' (2018) by Tristan Claridge

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Will we use this crisis to rediscover the value of community – or for more suspicion and othering? by Mike Parker

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Will we use this crisis to rediscover the value of community – or for more suspicion and othering? by Mike Parker

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Human evolution is a long old game. We still have our coccyx, the remnant of a long-vanished tail, and our wisdom teeth, from when we needed them to grind food like an elementary mill. Even getting goosebumps is just a hark back to the time when we needed, like dogs, to raise our hairy hackles at potential or perceived threats. It's just as well that that's developed out of us, because right now, there'd be a hell of a lot of hackle-raising going on from our regulation two metres apart. We'd be like a kennel of pit bulls.

While physical changes to our bodies evolve at a glacial pace over dozens of generations, our brains are rewired with almost indecent haste. Already, you see a photo of friends clustered together, grinning inanely at the camera, and you gasp at the sheer recklessness of it, and screech the mantra, "social distancing, people! Two metres! Now!" And then you realise that it is a photograph from only three weeks ago.

The first time it impressed on me how quickly, and how thoroughly, our behaviour is impacted by an external change in circumstances came with the smoking ban in 2007. Almost immediately, and despite the law covering only public places, it became unthinkable to light up in someone's house. Smokers became pariahs overnight. When the BBC recently rescreened zeitgeist 90s drama This Life, the middle-aged were terrified that our cherished memories would be trashed, but actually what made us ache with nostalgia was not the copious shagging, but the carefree smoking.

There is plenty of evidence that the digital age has already significantly rewired our brains, and so our behaviour. I've lost count of the people who've told me, rather shamefacedly, that they don't really read books any more because they don't think they can concentrate for long enough. Our butterfly minds skitter around, hopping from one diversion to the next, and never quite finishing any of them. Is there anyone using lockdown to learn Portuguese or read Ulysses, as we were so ambitiously proclaiming at the outset?
Despots
In times of crisis, the change accelerates rapidly, and the goalposts of normality shift fast. Right now, they could go either way. We have, on the one hand, already seen a phenomenal surge in community organisation; neighbours, including many who have never even spoken before, forming shopping and support networks, or going out of their way to look out for the elderly and vulnerable.

For every one of those however, there is someone whose idea of looking out for their neighbours goes no further than filming them through net curtains in order to dob them in to the authorities. "We are getting calls from people who say 'I think my neighbour is going out on a second run - I want you to come and arrest them'", said an incredulous spokesman for Northamptonshire police on Saturday, and that "We have had dozens and dozens of these calls." He then forgot to add, "now excuse me, while I fire up the camera-drone; we've had intel that there's someone on a footpath just outside Kettering."

(For what it's worth, the police may find that they've bitten off more than they can chew by taking on the fundamentalist wing of the Ramblers Association. These are people who know their rights and will very happily reel off, for as long as it takes, every single one of the relevant sub-clauses of the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act. And don't try and do them for lack of social distancing either. They've not made eye contact with anyone since 1988.)

Which way will we jump? Towards using this crisis as a way of reminding ourselves of what matters, of reordering society, of closing its gaps and rediscovering the value of community? Or towards further atomisation, suspicion, hostility and othering, covertly encouraged by despots with crack comms teams? It's one or the other, and it's time to choose.
Read more in Mike Parker's series for Nation.Cymru below:
Part 1: We've been told before that things will never be the same again - can we mean it this time?

Part 2: Last weekend's pandemic-panic awayday was inevitable - but so was the visceral response

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Will we use this crisis to rediscover the value of community - or for more suspicion and othering?

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Mike Parker Human evolution is a long old game. We still have our coccyx, the remnant of a long-vanished tail, and our wisdom teeth, from when we needed them to grind food like an elementary mill. Even getting goosebumps is just a hark back to the time when we needed, ...

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Andy Green is a PR and communications guru. Here's his take on a new branch of PR that focuses on the social and the humane.

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This week is 'Social Capital Week' (Feb 24-28) and provides the opportunity to share some profound new insights on a potential new branch of Public Relations and Comms practice - Social Capital PR. Find out what it, why is it different and why we urgently need to harness its potential to create the change we seek in the world.

With declining levels of trust in media, influencers and experts, coupled with growing media fragmentation is the way forward to go back to the very basics of social inter-action? Do we need to do less digital default and more face-to-face communications, building on relationships and shared identities? All of which helps build what is known as 'Social Capital'.

Most will recognise the term 'Social Capital', yet few really understand what is, how it works and how it could be harnessed to provide an improved way of doing 'Public Relations'.

Social Capital focuses on the social networks that exist between us, the character of those networks, the strength of the ties, and the extent to which those networks foster trust and reciprocity. Social Capital is defined by the World Bank for example, as 'referring to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions Social capital is not just the sum of the institutions which underpin a society - it is the glue that holds them together'.

Could 'Social Capital PR' become a new branch of public relations practice, using social connections, relationships, norms, mutual obligations and identity to a place to achieve communication, engagement or behaviour change outcomes?

To understand Social Capital you need to recognise it has three key dimensions:

Bonding Social Capital - the potency of a sense of belonging to a group or place, and being a part of a bigger whole, for example "I'm a West Ham football club fan."

Bridging Social Capital - connecting with like-minded others, "I like to engage with those who are like me university-educated, of liberal opinions or share my interest in archaeology, dogs, and travel."

Linking Social Capital - connecting with people unlike you, but who occupy the same space where you live or work. "That's the person who lives down the street: although I don't know them we do have shared interests of our neighbourhood and community..."
21 characteristics of Social Capital PR
Public Relations is about earning trust in the relationships around you. Trust is at the heart of reputation, influence, relationships or mutual understanding. No man or woman is an island. The species that co-exist, co-operate or collaborate better survive and thrive.

Social Capital PRis characterised by:

1. A change of mindset. It's not about you doing things to other people where, as a result of your one-way inter-action they act or change in isolation. Social Capital PR is rather about your changing together as a result of coming together, creating either deeper bonds or changes on both sides as a result of the social interaction. It is about the connections of 'we' rather than 'me'. It creates change within the context of individuals and their relationships with their wider communities or networks, where there is mutual respect and mutual change or creation of a sense of mutual obligations: if you ask others to change, you should expect to change as well. Together you become stronger.

2. About value within relationships. It uses relationships not as conduits for communication, but through engaging and nurturing the assets and power within these relationships. It seeks to use the relationships of bonding, bridging and linking social capitals as instruments for change.

3. Is rooted in behaviour change of others and yourself. You create change not by providing information to change awareness, attitudes or opinions but through identifying and leveraging shared beliefs, values, norms, narratives and levels of trust and trustworthiness.

4. Engagement is different to communication: 'Communication' is the transfer of information to another party. 'Engagement' is the authentic collaboration, co-creation and co-production between two parties

5. Reciprocity is at the heart of building Social Capital. You should wherever possible make an ask in any social interaction. At the very least ask for feedback, spread where necessary word-of-mouth or share any learning. By invoking reciprocity you can generate greater collective resource and more importantly change the underlying narrative of working together, a partnership, ideally od equals in your relationship.

6. Addresses the intangibles in social networks. It leverages the resource and assets within relationships, addressing non-concrete issues including:

· Earning trust. 'Trust' is not built. It is earned. Trust can only be obtained by someone else giving it to you

· Building confidence - perhaps the most unrecognised ingredient to successful communication and engagement. You cannot demand people 'be confident'. Yet by providing authentic, credible role models can inspire others to grow confidence.

· Being part of somewhere - leveraging the value from a sense of belonging to a larger group or place.

· Tacit knowledge - the unwritten, not formally coded knowhow within a situation.

7. Is about communities rather than interest groups, publics or stakeholders. You can belong to a community and seek to change its prevailing goals and values. If you disagree with the core goals of an interest group, you are apart from it.

8. Social Capital PR typically harnesses emergent, bottom-up change. or rhizomatic change, rather than top-down direction. This is because social capital activity is rooted and grows up or from any direction from the assets within the environment; working with what is already there within a place or community.

9. Is usually about starting small, often person-to-person, face-to-face engagements, rather than seeking to connect as quickly as possible with the largest mass of people. Change is created through a process of building a compelling coalition around 'innovators', someone holding a distinct point of view or behaviour who are able to attract small numbers of 'early adopters', people willing to adopt the innovator's new behaviours.

10. You grow the change you seek by creating movements for change. You invest in the capacity-building of the community of 'innovators' and 'early adopters' to create a growing critical mass for challenging an existing established way of thinking or doing.

11. Is more about creating new social norms rather than delivering messages: a social norm contains within it a sense of obligation both for you and what you perceive and expect from others. Major change occurs in a community through the actions of 'Innovator ' and 'Early Adopters' who, through their actions, create new social norms that make it less comfortable or more risky for the 'Early' and 'Late Majority' of people to resist change. Inertia, not opposition, is often the biggest barrier to change.

12. You can leverage shared identities to engage and motivate people. By appealing to a common shared identity facilitates bonding and mutually supporting activity.

13. Is non-linear, rhizomatic in character. It is about embracing tactics such as creating opportunities for people to share in a non-directed way the same space and time together, to encourage a sense of similarity and increase in liking, without any formal activity, agenda or communication.

14. Is about operating to a bigger dashboard 'listening to a bigger picture', absorbing more informal data or heuristics, and being receptive to more intuitive, relationship and place-based responses. It is the 'wider space', the spaces in the background on a plan, between the boxes that mark target groups and around the arrows that indicate a connection between groups. It is about the indirect connections, the dialogical, rather than the direct dialectical connections

15. Measuring Social Capital is a challenging, complex, and often elusive task of measuring the value of human interaction. Much of its value resides in intangible, emotional elements. It is possible however, to create a dashboard of behaviour and attitude change and other indirect measures. Scientists in studying the cosmos are comfortable with the concept of 'Dark Matter' - space where they have no idea what goes on inside it. Understanding the complex, ambiguous map of emotional connections will inherently involve accepting the equivalent of 'dark matter' in our landscape.

16. It is a double-edged asset in addressing social justice. Bonding Social Capital can drive ordinary people to do extra-ordinary things with either negative or positive outcomes. Bridging Social Capital can be used to maintain exclusive social networks to the detriment of the wider common good.

17. Indicators for levels of Social Capital are inherently mixed and even contradictory. Indicators of Social Capital will usually produce mixed or even contrary signals.

There has for example, in modern western societies been a significant increase in levels of bridging social capital, where people know more people like them. Yet there is also witnessed significant declines in linking social capital - connections with people unlike you declining.

For the task of achieving social justice, bonding social capital can operate in a positive sense, empowering ordinary people to do extra-ordinary things. Yet, can also be a force for inertia or negative resistance to change, or supporting anti-social behaviour.

18. You design small asks in your calls to action and embrace nudge theory to enable them to easier to do and more likely to be adopted. General calls to action like 'can you lend a hand' or 'we need volunteers', even worse 'can you join the committee' require too big a step for the other person to make. Identify instead small asks, for example 'Can you give out this leaflet to houses in your street?' or 'Can you retweet this Tweet?' are easily do-able, do not invoke a sense of risk of greater commitment or uncertainty.

19. Change your job title to be a 'Tummler'. A 'Tummler' is a Yiddish word for some who get a party going. (Think about parties where despite the music playing, no one is dancing, until a few are on the dance floor and others are encouraged to follow). Unlike a 'Cruise Director model which stimulates activity through their presence, but the activity dies away once they are no longer there, the 'Tummler' builds the capacity of others to sustain the activity to carry on without them.

20. Nurture your 12 'Connectors', people who make things happen for you, recommend you to others without prompting. The number and calibre of your Connectors will probably determine the success of your next campaign, or even your life.

21. Reflect how Social Capital is evident in much of existing public relations practice. Outstanding media relations, public affairs, influence campaigns, engagement or networking practice are based on relationships, who you know rather than what you know - Social Capital. Social Capital can also be a potent element within narratives, news or content, word-of-mouth leveraging shared identities or relationships.

Although Social Capital may be present at an unconscious level within much current communications activity, by making it explicit rather than tacit, through understanding its processes and tactics, we can reinvigorate practice through a new dimension of public relations called 'Social Capital PR' to harness a back-to-fundamentals approach in our social inter-actions.

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'Social Capital PR' - a new branch of public relations and Comms practice

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This week is 'Social Capital Week' (Feb 24-28) and provides the opportunity to share some profound new insights on a potential new branch of Public Relations and Comms practice - Social Capital PR.

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Britons' sense of community belonging is falling (Feb 2020)

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Britons' sense of community belonging is falling (Feb 2020)

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Britons’ sense of belonging to their community has declined over the past five years, with official figures showing people are engaging less with their neighbours but more with social media.

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Britons' sense of belonging to their community has declined over the past five years, with official figures showing people are engaging less with their neighbours but more with social media.

Across the UK, positive engagement with neighbours, such as exchanging favours or stopping to talk, fell by three and four percentage points respectively between 2011-12 and 2017-18. The figures come from data released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics.

Feelings of belonging to one's neighbourhood have also fallen in recent years. In 2017-18, 62% agreed or strongly agreed they belonged to their local area, compared with 69% in 2014-15. Britons were more likely to say they had at least one close friend and had used the internet for social networking in the last three months.

Compared with 2011-12, people were less likely to assist others by providing help to sick, elderly or disabled people or through parental links after children have left home.

Reported membership of political, voluntary, professional or recreational organisations declined by five percentage points between 2011-12 and 2017-18, according to the data.

Parents in the UK were less likely to regularly give help to and receive help from their adult children who did not live with them in 2017-18 than in 2011-12, falling by four and six percentage points respectively.

Though people felt less connected to their communities, both men and women felt safer. Across England and Wales, people reported feeling safer walking alone at night in 2018-19 compared with 2012-13, with a 12 percentage point increase for women and a four percentage point increase for men. Though women continue to feel less safe than men, with a 20 percentage point gap observed in 2018-19, this gap has narrowed since 2012-13.

Eleanor Rees, head of the social wellbeing analysis team at the ONS, said: "Our social capital findings show that we are engaging less with our neighbours but more with social media. We also note that we feel safer walking alone after dark in our neighbourhoods but more recently fewer of us feel like we belong to them."

Sunder Katwala, the director of independent thinktank British Future, said: "These new findings underline something that many people have felt for some time - that we have become less connected with our fellow citizens. Our society is more divided than any of us would like."

In January, Katwala was among several signatories from the worlds of sport, faith and business calling for a decade of reconnection to heal divides in British society.

The open letter, signed by Sir Hugh Robertson of the British Olympic Association, Glastonbury's Emily Eavis and Carolyn Fairbairn of the CBI, called on citizens to "reach out to just one person we don't know, or from whom we have drifted apart".

Katwala said: "Most people would like to feel more connected with their neighbours and people in their community. But rebuilding a more connected society will take action at all levels, from the government and institutions to communities and individuals too. There is a public appetite for us all to play our part in ensuring we turn this around."
Topics

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Britons' sense of community belonging is falling, data shows

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Britons' sense of belonging to their community has declined over the past five years, with official figures showing people are engaging less with their neighbours but more with social media. Across the UK, positive engagement with neighbours, such as exchanging favours or stopping to talk, fell by three and four percentage points respectively between 2011-12 and 2017-18.

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An exploration of the dramatic rise of solo living and the seismic impact it is having on culture, business and politics.

50% of adult Americans are single, with one out of every seven living alone. Rates are even higher in the UK.

Though many will claim to have settled on a lasting state of singleness, and are wealthy enough to pursue it (like owning a car, or foreign travel), there are many, many more for whom living alone is a shadow existecne.

Klinenberg identifies a gorwing population of single "unmarriageable men": poorly educated, unskilled and often struggling with chronic ill health caused by multiple addictions. They live alone because, more often than not, they are too ashamed to go home. They fashion a 'defensive individualism', a spiny armour designed to repel neighbours who may be planning to pop round to rob them or suggest getting high.

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FT article on the importance to wellbeing of social infrastructure

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FT article on the importance to wellbeing of social infrastructure

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Interesting article drawing on the research of George Ward shows that in European elections since 1970, the government’s share of the vote depends more on the measured happiness of the people than on their incomes or their unemployment rate.

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The UK government is rethinking its objectives at last. It wants to prioritise the economic wellbeing of the north of England, which is welcome. But that is not enough. We need a wider view of what really matters to people. US founding thinker Thomas Jefferson set out the right objective for any government, writing that "the care of human life and happiness . . . is the only legitimate object of good government."

Increasingly, policymakers are taking this same, wider view. In 2019, New Zealand had its first " wellbeing budget", which looks beyond economic growth to measure success. The chief ministers of New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland have proclaimed their shared belief in that approach. All three are women. The UK's Boris Johnson now has a great opportunity - to be the first male prime minister to propose a wellbeing budget.

That is very much in his interest. Research by George Ward shows that in European elections since 1970, the government's share of the vote depends more on the measured happiness of the people than on their incomes or their unemployment rate. Equally, the Democratic vote in each US county in the 2016 presidential election depended more on the happiness of the people in the county than on their economic position. In other words, voting behaviour depends more on non-economic sources of wellbeing than on income or unemployment. So, despite what election strategist James Carville said, it's not "the economy stupid".

This striking finding should not really be surprising. When we try to explain why individual people vary in happiness, income explains less than 2 per cent of the variation. By contrast, mental and physical health and human relationships explain nearer 20 per cent of the variation. Similarly, when researchers ask people what they worry about day-to-day, the top factors are all to do with mental and physical health and human relationships. "Money or debt" comes sixth.

You may think that the state cannot help with those other things as much as it can with people's incomes. That's not true. I have worked on income inequality and unemployment for most of my life but, when you adopt the happiness perspective, you realise how much governments can affect all those other things. This is largely because of the new science of subjective wellbeing.

The UK Treasury should use this science when it evaluates the priorities for Chancellor Sajid Javid's upcoming spending round. The question should always be: how much does each proposal increase the wellbeing of the people for each pound of money it costs? In 2018, the Treasury Green Book on policy evaluation was revised to open the door to this approach. Mr Johnson's chief adviser Dominic Cummings should demand a proper unit to apply this test to every spending proposal.

We can already predict some of the things that would rise up the list of priorities. First, mental health. Modern evidence-based psychological therapy can cure half of all cases of depression, anxiety disorder or child conduct disorder within 10 sessions. Such interventions are the most cost-effective generators of happiness and would save billions of pounds now spent on disability payments and criminal justice. At the very least, real expenditure on mental health should rise twice as fast as on physical health. Ask yourself which would make more difference to people's lives - HS2 rail or improvements in mental health, especially of children?

Next, education. Schools should be using the excellent available evidence to teach the best way to lead lives that are happy and bring happiness to others. We should make wellbeing an explicit goal of schools and measure it. It would cost little extra. And when youngsters leave school, those wanting to go to university should have far improved access to the training courses they need.

Then we should invest in family stability and preventing domestic violence. There are excellent antenatal classes that reduce family conflict, and treatments to address conflict and violence when they occur. The National Health Service should provide both.

Finally, we should attack the plague of loneliness with better town planning, community services and supported volunteering. And we need to restore the levels of community services and social care to where they were before austerity began in 2010.

The all-party parliamentary group on wellbeing economics has made the case for all these changes and they should be the centrepiece of a new strategy for greater wellbeing.

Social infrastructure is what we need to refurbish. If wellbeing is the goal, that is the most important investment we can make. Markets may not count such spending as investment and prefer to finance physical infrastructure. But government is about the happiness of the people.

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The north of England needs social infrastructure, not just rail

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The UK government is rethinking its objectives at last. It wants to prioritise the economic wellbeing of the north of England, which is welcome. But that is not enough. We need a wider view of what really matters to people.

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Julian Tudor Hart was a pioneering GP who set up a practice in Glyncorrwg in the upper Afan valley, from where he also undertook action research, and supported numerous other trainee GPs to do likewise.

He pioneered routine preventative healthcare and recognsied the value of social and community relations in his treatment. Hart was also an early advocate of coproduction of treatments and social prescribing. He died in 2018 (The Guardian obituary).

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'Building Communities, Changing Lives' (2001) by Stephen Thake

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'Building Communities, Changing Lives' (2001) by Stephen Thake

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Published by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Thake outlines the many benefits of local "large, independent
neighbourhood regeneration organisations".

One of these is how such 'anchors' can re-build social capital, the erosion of which, Thake argues, is a key element of social exclusion.

One specific element he focuses on is the breakdown of trust:

"The breakdown of social networks, the withdrawal from the public domain and the resulting fragmentation help to create an environment where rumour and misinformation can take root. The lack of social networks and absence of structures for resolving local difficulties mean that, in many disadvantaged neighbourhoods, fractiousness and distrust are endemic".

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Thake - Building Communities, Changing Lives

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For many the seminal text on the decline - and revival - of social capital in the United States.

It built on a 1995 paper: ‘Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, pp. 65–78.

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'Valuing Social Infrastructure' (2018) by Community Links

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'Valuing Social Infrastructure' (2018) by Community Links

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Written by @CarolineSlocock who identifies within a broader overview of social infrastructure and its disappearance, privatisation and disinvestment, the importance of community and social interactions and connections (social capital).

Social infrastructure such as recreational facilities, proximite services, positive social norms, and influence over buildings and services are complemented by social capital.