Robert Putnam’s bestseller Bowling Alone needs little introduction, not to mention another review. Yet despite its publication a decade ago, the volume remains highly relevant for thinking about community as the social aspect of sustainability.
In the 20th century’s final four decades, the vast majority of civic engagement indicators – political, civic, and religious participation, workplace connections, informal socializing, altruism, philanthropy, reciprocity, honesty, and trust – declined in the United States, eroding community and social capital. Americans now do less with others and more by themselves, turning from joiners to observers, from doers to watchers, and from schmoozers and machers to loners.
The reduction in social capital and community involvement is attributable, in the increasing order of influence, to pressures of time and money, including “the special pressures on two-career families”; suburbanization, commuting, and sprawl; TV entertainment and its privatization of leisure time; and generational change, with a more detached and individualistic generation of baby boomers and Gen Xers replacing “the long civic generation”.
If you consider that “social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy”, we’d be well advised to take action to replenish the stock of social capital in the American community. Putnam’s “agenda for social capitalists”, a set of recommendations for increasing social capital, reads a lot like solutions for maximizing social sustainability:
- increase participation in collective activities and actions
- make workplaces more “family-friendly and community-congenial”;
- foster electronic communication that reinforces community engagement (social media does that only to the extent that it encourages face-to-face interaction);
- engage in spiritual communities of meaning;
- use the arts as a means “for convening diverse groups of fellow citizens”;
- design built environments to encourage more integration, walking, and spaces for socializing with neighbors (and less commuting);
- participate in public life.
Putnam suggests that periods of social decay and civic engagement come in cycles. With its focus on community and social responsibility sustainability may be just the right reaction to hyper-individualism of the post-modern era. The cycle plays into every sustainability practitioner’s cards.
It took me unusually long – two weeks – to finish Bowling Alone. While it reads well, like a social science mystery, I found myself unable to skip any of the interesting, valuable, and well-researched detail populating every densely-printed page.
If you’re a sustainable business owner or marketer aiming to improve your company’s social bottom line, read this book. To make informed decisions in encouraging community involvement, you need to take stock of available information. Bowling Alone provides enough of it to occupy you for a few lone evenings.
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Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
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