The word “meritocracy” has reached new heights, becoming ubiquitous in everyday conversations and debates about identity politics. The concept is deceptively simple: high ability leads to well-deserved roles in the workforce. And yet, in the tech sector where I work, I witness a world of racial and gender homogeneity that does not represent the racial and gender heterogeneity of the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Latino/Hispanic workers represent only 5.7 percent of software developers, although they represent 18.5 percent of the total US workforce. And although African American/Black workers make up only 5.7 percent of software developers, they make up about 12.6 percent of the American workforce.
Maybe… it’s not just about the skills we bring to the table. We live in a world where it may matter who you know, but also where systems of power benefit those who have certain networks and access to resources, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, father of social capital theory, said. explained decades ago. Those with social capital can use it to maintain power and reinforce authority, often at the expense of those with less.
In 2019, I turned to an EdSurge column to share my opinion: a loud call for more attention to the role social capital plays in workforce education and training. But after that, I decided to take three years and immerse myself in the study of social capital research for my doctoral thesis. Having conducted much more research, including my own mixed methods study, I am more convinced than ever: schools need to focus more on developing social capital.
Here’s a sample of why and how.
What research says about social capital
Bourdieu defined social capital as “the set of real or potential resources that are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual knowledge or recognition.” In short, social capital theory implies that those with larger and stronger networks, relationships, and interpersonal trust excel at achieving their goals. As? Through resources made available by connections, resources that can be mobilized through links in networks.
In the early 2000s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development described social capital as a space that requires more research to help students pursue higher education and careers. More recently, more and more academics, Bram Lancee to Matloob Piracha, have linked the importance of social capital to improved labor market outcomes, arguing for greater attention to the relationship between “social relationships” and “finding a job.” A analysis from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, for example, found that young adults who found jobs through informal networks had higher salaries compared to those who used more formal job search and application techniques.
Interestingly, researchers in other sectors (including economics, public health, and sociology) have explored similar theories and found that social capital can improve more than just access to higher education and job opportunities, as one might expect. Data of the Study of health and academic performance of adolescents, for example, showed that female students are more likely to take advanced courses when they are surrounded by peers with experience in higher-level math courses. In this case, networks effectively push students to try harder academically than they would have otherwise.
What educators can do
There are ample opportunities for educators to provide significant development of social capital, specifically in the form of “institutional agents” and through access to the latest equipment and technologies.
Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar (2011) describe “institutional agents” as “high status” individuals who are not related and who can increase motivation and access to resources. My research suggests that educational programs should place more emphasis on developing these relationships with institutional agents, not only because of the motivation factor, but also because a single relationship can bring multiple resources to a student’s life. An example might be a school that hires local employers whose employees can mentor students, introducing them to new skills, resources, or experts related to their field of work.
At the same time, educators often have the ability to purchase or acquire materials that students do not have access to at home or otherwise. For example, IT teachers and administrators may be able to use school budget money to purchase technology tools such as rugged computing devices, 3D printers, and cutting-edge software; This is crucial to increasing students’ technological social capital as it provides access to elements outside of their everyday technical experience.
But most importantly, it is time for educators and researchers alike to study and attempt to measure social capital as comprehensively and consistently as we do content knowledge with tests like the SAT or STAAR. In many ways, certain industries (viz. health, sociologyand economic Sciences — have set the standard for the use of social capital indices on both a macro (group/community) and micro (individual) scale. But education has not yet reached that point.
Educators interested in learning more can check out the Search Institute, which has identified and created tools to measure social capital. These include name generators, which ask people to list the names of people they know or interact with in specific social contexts, and resource generators, which ask people to report which financial, informational, or professional resources they can access. access through your social network. New quantitative methods have also emerged to assess online social capital, including social network analysis that assesses relationships and ties between different individuals and/or groups. The Harvard Opportunity Insights organization, for example, created the “Social capital atlas”, an open access tool that analyzes Facebook relationships to explore “economic connectedness,” a theoretical predictor of economic mobility.
Using these tools could lead a teacher to adopt some of the above instruments, write their own version of a social capital survey, and conduct that survey with students. It could lead a school to lead the collection of social capital data at the beginning and end of the school year, emulating other formative assessments that take place in September and May to generate points of comparison. And it could lead a state education leader to integrate social capital theory into policymaking, such as providing more opportunities for school systems to acquire funding to put toward tutoring, job shadowing or internship programs.
Beware of the deficit mentality
There is a lot of power in social capital, both for entities that try to retain that power, in the style of an “old boys network” (Putnam, 2000), and for individuals who seek to progress and diversify homogeneous spaces or achieve their own professional career. .
But there is an important pitfall that educators should pay attention to.
Researcher Tara J. Yosso published her seminal Article on race, ethnicity and education in 2005. In it, he denounces “deficit thinking,” a common misconception that racial minority students and families possess little or no cultural knowledge, skills, or networks upon entering educational institutions.
Unfortunately, many social capital studies prior to the 2000s failed to 1) recognize that all individuals possess some form of social capital from the moment they are born, and 2) incorporate student voice in exploring the definition. of social capital, which further increases the deficit. lens. Some may incorporate qualitative interviews with students or student advisory groups, but these studies generally refrain from incorporating student perspectives to define or quantify social capital as students see it, preferring to fit student perspectives into descriptions. or predefined frames. This is a key flaw.
For teachers and schools wishing to adopt some of the instruments mentioned above, there is an opportunity to remedy this problem. Co-designing surveys with students is one tactic to avoid that deficit landmine.
We owe it to students, especially those from underrepresented groups, to provide them with as many mechanisms for developing social capital as we do for achieving knowledge and skills, through opportunities for growth and validating their lived experiences.
