September 24, 2010 at 5:54 pm | Posted in childcare centers, new books, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment
A new paper by Mario L. Small in the Royal Society of the Arts journal makes the case that many of the suggestions put forth to build social capital have little hope of success. The reason? Today, most people are too busy to build social capital, even if they think doing so would be a good idea. Figuring out how to build social capital requires seriously reconsidering how people actually create and sustain those social bonds that end up being useful, trustworthy, and productive. Based on his research on the unanticipated roles childcare centers played in structuring the networks of mothers, he suggests that would-be social capitalists shift attention from the individual to the routine organization. As Matthew Taylor puts it, the best way to build social capital may be “by accident.” See also commentary in the Social Capital Blog.
August 8, 2010 at 1:25 pm | Posted in childcare centers, education, geography, neighborhoods, organizational networks, social service agencies, youth | Leave a comment
Geoffrey Canada’s effort to transform the lives of low-income children in Harlem by providing a comprehensive array of services within a 100 block area has convinced many skeptics, produced a top seller, and inspired a presidential effort. A new controversial report by the Urban Institute suggests it may have been a waste of money, at least with respect to its effects on education. After comparing the test performance of children in the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy to those in other New York City charter schools, the authors conclude, rather uncharitably, “that the HCZ Promise Academy is a middling New York City charter school.” Canada responds, calling the report “wrong-headed,” for, among other things, misunderstanding the point of the HCZ. Whitehurst and Croft promptly reply, standing their ground. Considering that Obama has requested $210 million for the initiative inspired by HCZ, and that Congress seems reluctant to provide it, we really ought to get the story straight.
August 28, 2009 at 6:38 pm | Posted in amenities, barbershops, beauty salons, childcare centers, data | 1 Comment
Want to find out how many large supermarkets are located within 5 miles of a given address? Or how much each of the barbershops in Harlem did in sales last year? Or how many employees each of the banks in Chicago’s South Side has? Or how about the credit rating of all small retail shops in South Central Los Angeles? Or the number of Lutheran churches in Minneapolis with more than two personal computers? Check out ReferenceUSA, which provides what they claim is the world’s most comprehensive data on U.S. businesses and organizations (around 14 million). Designed for commercial purposes, there are limitless possibilities for scholars interested in neighborhood conditions, spatial analysis, labor issues, and urban conditions more generally. Their data are assembled from phone directories, county courthouses, public record notices, and others. A team of 600 researchers works full time on maintaining and updating the database. Check out their promotional video on data quality. (The service also has personal residential data on 100 million U.S. households, the type of data used by telemarketers. You can send them an email to remove your name.) Urbanorgs researchers will want to know that the business data are very easy to download (in Excel, tab delmited, and other formats) and remarkably rich. From their website: “The lists include business name and phone number, complete address, key executive name, SIC code, employee size, sales volume, business expenditures and much more. In addition… geo-codes for mapping, fax and toll-free numbers, website address, franchise and brand information, headline news, liens, judgements and bankruptcies, email addresses, number of computers, work-at-home businesses, and business credit rating scores.” Many libraries subscribe to the service. The more obscure data are not available for every organization, but what is available is impressive. (Updated)
June 5, 2009 at 12:26 am | Posted in barbershops, beauty salons, childcare centers, churches, grocery stores, neighborhoods, new books, organizational networks, poverty, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment
Mario Small has published a new book, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everday Life. From the book description: Social capital theorists have shown that some people do better than others in part because they enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people’s deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, childcare centers, schools, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book illustrates and develops this argument by exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers. Relying on scores of in-depth interviews with mothers, quantitative data on both mothers and centers, and detailed case studies of other routine organizations (from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches), Unanticiapted Gains shows that how much people gain from their connections depends substantially on institutional conditions they often do not control, and through everyday process they may not even be aware of. Click here for more information and an excerpt.
January 5, 2009 at 12:54 am | Posted in amenities, childcare centers, grocery stores, neighborhoods, news, non-profits, organizational density, organizational networks, poverty, social organization, what to read | Leave a comment
The latest issue of the journal City and Community (December 2008 ) features several articles that explore analytic assumptions, international perspectives, and new directions in the study of communities commonly referred to as ghettos. In one of the pieces, “Four Reasons to Abandon the Idea of ‘The Ghetto,’” Mario Small questions the common use of the concept “the ghetto” to theorize conditions in poor, predominantly black urban neighborhoods in the United States. He argues, among other things, that poor black neighborhoods differ dramatically from place to place in their organizational density, the number of banks, childcare centers, pharmacies, and other everyday organizations.
Papers in the symposium:
The Ghetto: Origins, History, Discourse (p 347-352)
Bruce Haynes, Ray Hutchison
Involuntary Segregation and the Ghetto: Disconnecting Process and Place (p 353-357)
Herbert J. Gans
A Century of Harlem in New York City: Some Notes on Migration, Consolidation, Segregation, and Recent Developments (p 358-365)
Andrew A. Beveridge
Barrio Geneology (p 366-371)
Diego Vigil
From the Outside Looking in: A “European” Perspective on the Ghetto (p 372-377)
Talja Blokland
Enclaves, Condominiums, and Favelas: Where Are the Ghettos in Brazil? (p 378-383)
Circe Monteiro
Reconsidering the “Ghetto”1 (p 384-388 )
Anmol Chaddha, William Julius Wilson
Four Reasons to Abandon the Idea of “The Ghetto” (p 389-398 )
Mario Luis Small
City and Community Volume 7, Number 4, December 2008
November 27, 2008 at 10:49 am | Posted in childcare centers, neighborhoods, organizational networks, what to read | Leave a comment
“Why Organizational Ties Matter for Neighborhood Effects,” by Mario L. Small, Erin M. Jacobs, and Rebekah P. Massengill, argues that experiments such as “Moving To Opportunity” may have failed to consistently find that neighborhood poverty affects wellbeing because they tend to ignore the role of organizational connections . Based on original qualitative and quantitative data on New York City childcare centers, they find that centers often connect parents to resource-rich organizations throughout the city, that these connections tend to be important to wellbeing, and that centers in poor neighborhoods are not, in fact, less well connected than those in non-poor neighborhoods. In Social Forces.
