Putnam says more ethnic diversity can mean fewer connections and less trust
among citizens.
"The bottom line is that there are special challenges that are posed to
building social capital by ethnic diversity," Putnam said in 2001. "Since ethnic
diversity is in the future of the US and Canada, this means we need to devote
special attention to how you build connectedness or social capital in that
context."
In a study, presented in Ottawa in December 2001, Putnam said that he had
found that social connectedness is less likely to be found in areas of the
United States most affected by recent waves of immigration. And it isn't just a
lack of trust between different races or cultures, but within them as well.
"It's going to be important that we redouble our efforts to build new forms
of connectedness in the face of growing multicultural diversity," he says.
Prof Putnam is to head up a joint project between Harvard University and the
University of Manchester aimed at a better understanding of the challenges of
contemporary society.
The programme, Social Change: A Joint Project of
Harvard and Manchester, will be directed by Robert Putnam, from
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who is renowned for his research into
community ties known as "social capital".
As part of the project, Prof Putnam will take up a part-time visiting
professorship at Manchester for five years. His activities will include a series
of collaborative projects, graduate summer school coursework and postgraduate
programmes.
Named one of the Guardian's top 100 intellectuals last year and a member of
the American National Academy of Sciences and the British Academy, Prof Putnam
popularised the concept of social capital in his 1994 book, Making Democracy Work, and charted its
30-year decline in the US in Bowling
Alone, published in 2000.
Prof Putnam has told the Financial Times that he had delayed publishing his
research on diversity until he could develop proposals to compensate for the
negative effects of diversity, saying it "would have been irresponsible to
publish without that".
The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we
hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse
than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not
like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."
Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the
most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for
rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians'
picnic".
When the data were adjusted for class, income and
other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the
same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don't trust the local
mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they
don't trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there's more of is
protest marches and TV-watching."
The FT says that British Home Office research has pointed in the same
direction and Prof Putnam said other European countries would be likely to have
similar trends.
Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the
"importing" and "exporting" societies, and that trends "have been socially
constructed, and can be socially reconstructed".
