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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". Saguaro Seminar: Civil Engagement in America The Saguaro Seminar: Civil Engagement in
America, an
ongoing initiative of Professor Robert Putnam at the John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard
University, says that the project focuses
on expanding what we know about our levels of trust and community engagement and
on developing strategies and efforts to increase this engagement. It strives to
develop a handful of far-reaching, actionable ideas to significantly increase
Americans' connectedness to one another and to community institutions. The
Saguaro Seminar is explicitly neither developing a civic engagement blueprint
for the twenty-first century that specifies every action to be taken, nor
producing a cookbook with thousands of potentially promising programs that may
lead to civic engagement.
Diversity, immigration and social capital: "The Financial Times had two misleading articles on this research Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity (10/08/06, John Lloyd) and a slightly more balanced Research shows disturbing picture of modern life (10/8/06, John Lloyd). By focusing almost exclusively on the 2nd of the 3 points above and painting it in an apocalyptic light, it paints a highly distorted view of our views and research on this issue," the Saguaro Seminar says.
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