Planning Social Capital: New Uranism in the Formation of Social Interaction, Social Connection, and Community Satisfaction
Name:
azu_etd_11193_sip1_m.pdf
Size:
13.74Mb
Format:
PDF
Description:
azu_etd_11193_sip1_m.pdf
Issue Date
2010Advisor
Galaskiewicz, JosephCommittee Chair
Galaskiewicz, JosephMetadata
Show full item recordPublisher
The University of Arizona.Rights
Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.Abstract
Over the past fifty or so years there has been a well examined decline in socialconnections and many other facets of American communities (Fischer 1982; Putnam2000; Freeman 2001; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears 2006; Dunham-Jones &Williamson 2009). New urbanism has been proposed as a tool to reverse some of thissocial decline in communities. This study seeks to understand the possible socialconnective benefits of new urbanism in a number of ways. First, a new urbanistcommunity is compared to a similar adjacent community that also happens to betraditional suburban community. The study examines differences between the twocommunities in terms of social connections, social interactions, and communitysatisfaction. Second, the study examines individual design elements of new urbanism to understand their relationships with social interactions and social connections. This study also examines community cohesion in terms of diverse social interactions and bridging ties. Previous studies suggest that bridging ties are more likely to be formed between persons who are connected with weaker social bonds (Granovetter, 1973) as well as persons who interact through spontaneous rather than planned forms of social interaction (Molm, Collett, & Schaefer 2007). Lastly, this study seeks to understand if any of the new urbanist design strategies examined are related to bridging ties. The findings of this study suggested that new urbanist communities do have more social interactions, social connections, and community satisfaction than do traditional suburban communities. The findings also suggested that four new urbanist design strategies: porches, community meetings, and mixed-use zoning are positively related to social interactions and social connections. Moreover, findings suggested that persons connected by weaker social bonds are indeed more likely to have bridging ties, however, they did not support the idea that persons who have more spontaneous interactions will also be more likely to have bridging ties. Lastly, the findings indicated that of all the new urbanist design strategies, only the neighborhood business center was positively related to bridging ties. Conversely, a negative relationship was found between resident's who use their porches and bridging ties.Type
textElectronic Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.Degree Level
doctoralDegree Program
SociologyGraduate College
Degree Grantor
University of ArizonaCollections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Disjointed Fluidity: A Proposition for Conceptualizing and Modeling Relational ProcessesSociologists have not neglected the study of relationships, but there remains no central definition of what a relationship is. This study offers a definition of relationships that supports a conceptual tool and visualization technique for analyzing relational processes that are otherwise difficult to model using standard ethnographic and social network analysis techniques. Grounded in the work of social psychologists and relational sociologists, the premise of this proposition is that relationships are both remembered and imagined. I maintain that relationships are molded by a flow of changing circumstances and dynamic cognitive processes, a characteristic that I refer to as disjointed fluidity. With data from my ethnographic study of doctoral student mentorship, I use this perspective to detail the mechanisms by which relationships are created, maintained, and dissolved. I go on to introduce a computational ethnographic technique that visualizes the properties and characteristics of relational processes. This book contributes to the efforts of relational sociologists to build a universal conceptualization of relationships. It differs from existing literature in its focus on the elements of relationships and their function in social construction.
-
Where to Invest? The Influence of Local Communities on Capital Allocation in the Emerging Industry of Impact InvestingHow are exchange partners matched to each other in the market given a great amount of uncertainty facing these actors about the match quality? Different from prior studies that focus mostly on the actor and dyadic level factors, I argue that the process of matching is embedded in the concrete social and geographic settings, and the social contexts—especially the level of social capital—of local communities can mitigate the uncertainty facing exchange partners and therefore facilitate their resource exchanges. I test my theory in the fast-growing market of impact investments. In addition to financial returns, impact investors explicitly seek to create social and environmental impacts but often have to face great uncertainties in selecting investment targets due to the difficulty of measuring the social and environmental impacts of their investments. Empirical results support my argument showing that to mitigate uncertainty, “impact-first” investors that are nonprofits and less concerned about financial returns, in contrast to “financial-first” investors that are forprofits and more concerned about financial returns, select target companies located in geographic communities rich in social capital. The findings of this study contribute to the matching literature, social capital theory, and impact investment research, and have practical implications regarding the importance of the local community to the impact investors’ efforts to achieve their impact goals.
