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In Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) relies on economic terminology such as "goods," "investment," and "productivity" to define social capital (Smith and Kulynych 2002). This emphasis on capitalism when discussing social networks obfuscates the importance of cultivating community, trust, and reciprocity among the citizenry. In this paper, I utilize Aristotle's conceptualization of the city and citizenship, as put forth in The Politics and The Nichomachean Ethics, as a theoretical framework to evaluate the implications of Putnam's definitions of social capital theory. Aristotle's arguments with regard to the city and citizenship indicate that fundamental changes would have to be made within the institutions and the priorities of the United States in order for a more cohesive, civically-engaged community to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of industrial scale timber management on public lands, the Forest Service, BLM, and community-based forestry organizations have shifted the focus of their economic development efforts from commodity production to restoration. The Jobs in the Woods program in the mid 1990s, for example, sought to provide employment opportunities for displaced timber and mill workers performing restoration on public lands through service contracting. Since then, Congress and the Forest Service have embarked on several new programs--the National Fire Plan, county payments, and stewardship contracting--that, in part, seek to create economic opportunities through contracting of forest restoration work. This paper looks at 12 years of Forest Service land management contracting in western Oregon, Washington, and northern California to determine if contractors local, rural, distressed, or public lands communities have been awarded more national forest management contracts over time. Using an HLM regression model, our preliminary findings suggest once we control for other factors, local contractors have been, in fact, receiving a smaller proportion of land management contracts than the once did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic solidarity is said to be important for motivating participation and fostering support for redistribution within democratic societies. This paper explores the content that contemporary political theorists have given to the idea of civic solidarity and consider the implications of the different models for the integration of immigrants. In section 1, I examine constitutional patriotism, which maintains that civic solidarity can and should be based on shared ideals or principles embodied in the constitution and political culture of a democratic society. This model is widely thought to reflect what it means to be an American. To be or become an American all that is required is a professed commitment to the political ideals embodied in the American constitution and American political culture. In section 2, I consider, liberal nationalism, which views a shared national culture as the appropriate basis for civic solidarity. Liberal nationalists defend the promotion of a common national culture on the grounds that it fosters the trust necessary for solving coordination problems, enabling deliberative democracy, and supporting redistributive policies of the welfare-state. In section 3, I examine a third model of solidarity, deep diversity, which acknowledges a diversity of ways of belonging to a political community. I argue that while deep diversity is the most inclusive of the three models, it is the least plausible since it is likely to be the result of civic solidarity rather than a possible basis for it. In section 4, I briefly consider the implications of these different models for the integration of immigrants. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital theory, particularly the work of Robert Putnam, has received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention. We argue that Putnam's formulation ignores the ways in which race is fundamental and constitutive to the structure and function of social capital in the United States. We suggest an alternative framework, one that: (1) treats race as more than an independent variable; (2) addresses the structural factors underlying social capital development; and (3) includes the role of gatekeepers in the process. Such a framework would allow us to have a more accurate, and more nuanced, understanding of how social capital operates in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews collected from 42 homeless individuals are used to map ideological predispositions. We find stark contrasts between the ideologies of homeless and non-homeless Americans. For the homeless, ideology is not associated with party identification or standard measures of political ideology. These differences are explained as the result of personal experiences with governmental and religious service providers and isolation from mainstream political discourse. Ideological and partisan information is used as a predictor of homeless persons' preference for governmental versus religious provision of social services, with negligible results. These findings present challenges for continuing research on how the homeless perceive politics and their attitudes toward resource provision. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]