Social Capital

Our topic this time was Social Capital and in the shortest explanation - it is a connection between individuals.
Social Capital is for example interest group, where people with the same interest belong. In Putnam's article all the researches were made in USA, but generally we can also use it in Europe. So researches in such field as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse and even health have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in civilly engaged communities.
Here we can take a moment to think if we belong to some interest group? And if we do, then does it somehow make us more active in society? In my opinion it is true (of course with exceptions). It seems like the sentence "the more you do the more you can" (mida rohkem sa teed, seda rohkem sa jõuad). So in that case we need Social Capital in every society to make people act, to actually make a democratic society a democratic one!
As it also says in Putnam's article: systematic inquiry shows that the quality of governance was determined by longstanding traditions civic engagement. The hallmark of successful regions were: voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and football clubs.

Putnam also explains how Social Capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefits.
As I said before - members of associations are more likely than nonmembers to participate in politics, to spend time with their neighbours, to express social trust and so on.

In the same time Luoma-aho (on Putnam) argues that people today have lost their sense of community, which makes collaboration and relationships difficult to establish and maintain. There are comparisons of history and nowadays society and the research shows that peoples participation in Social Capital is more and more reducing. That might be because of the mistrust and development of technology - people spend their time alone behind the computer/television, they don't have the need of belonging to an interest group.

Reputation plays also a big role in engaging people with and organization or any other group. It can be described as the value of public awareness in the social networks important to the organization (Luoma-aho article). PR has a big role of creating an organizations reputation. Of course in the same time it is not only the PR practitioners work to do that - also the organization has to be socially responsible, fair and honest to its customers and for the whole society. PR practitioners job is to make the organization seen in the society, to get the feedback from the public and in many cases also to make people interested, for example creating interest group.

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