Sources of social capital

In order to better understand the elements that act to create social capital, I thought it would be useful to study instances where groups have performed exceptionally well. A great reference for this is a book called "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration," by Patricia Ward Biederman. The book is a study of the circumstances under which groups of individuals ("Great Groups" as she calls them) achieve exceptional results, and ends with an attempt to draw out common factors. Some of those factors are:

• Great groups and great leaders create each other;
• Every great group has a strong leader;
• Great groups are full of talented people who can work together;
• Great groups see themselves as winning underdogs;
• Great groups always have an enemy;
• In great groups the right person has the right job;
• Great work is its own reward.

Now, these factors were derived from a study on creativity. If we were to extract the essence of what they convey, we could see that there are some common elements between these and the factors that act to create social capital. For instance, that great groups see themselves as winning underdogs and that they have an enemy indicates a common goal, an overarching mission to which all members are devoted. Great groups also exhibit order: every member has a well-defined role, an indication that social order is also a crucial factor is extracting maximum gains from a group's members. Also playing to this idea is the necessity of a strong leader, which can be reinterpreted as a need for this structure to have an "alpha", a figurehead around which (or whom) the group's efforts are organized.

In our class discussion, I've been a big proponent that social capital is an emergent phenomenon, something that happens spontaneously as a result of our human proclivity for association. I resisted the possibility that it could be created from the top by an authority. In fact, upon reflection, I think it depends on the unit of analysis. While I still don't think a government can form social capital by an act of will, I do think that it can, as a leader would for a smaller group, set a favourable stage where it can occur naturally.

The question still remains: Can social capital accrue without the intervention of a leader? To this, my answer is that it cannot. For all the reasons I have elaborated until now, I don't think humans can coordinate their efforts without some basic, elementary structure. This structure can sometimes be completely fortuitous, a result of circumstance, but this alone would not be enough. A group will still need to organize itself around a common objective, and this common objective will not live by itself, it will need to be embodied in a leader.