Customer Reviews

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Putnam's commentary on modern American life is frightening at best.

I read Putnam's article by the same title in college and it left a lasting imprint because it crystalized my feeling that Americans are no longer involving themselves in civic and community life. His new book expounds on this depressing thesis and explains, in tremendous detail how Americans no longer value civic engagement or regard relationships with neighbors as worthwhile. He cites declines in participation in public clubs such as the Shriners and Elks clubs as well as more informal social gatherings like poker playing and family dinners. Using statistics and time diaries he plots indicators of civic engagement from its peak in the early 1960's and its subsequent decline thereafter. The greatest casualty throughout this transformation is in social capital, a term which predates Putnam and describes the emotional and practical benefits of personal relationship.

Putnam shows that civic clubs that have shown growth in membership since the 1960's have mostly been in massive national organizations whose membership is nothing more than people on mailing lists who pay an annual fee. Furthermore, religious organizations, whose members participate in their communities at greater rates than non church goers, are beginning to change their focus from civic participation to only tending to the needs of their church members.

The affects of this disengagement have impacted our health, democracy and safety. Putnams points out an axiomatic principle that as people associate with one another in various capacities, whether it be at the kitchen table, the sidewalk, the card club or the PTA, people form relationships that provide a pool of friends who can be relied upon when time are hard, the dog needs to be walked, or the poor elderly woman next door needs her home painted. Each relationship is an asset, the accumulation of which can be called one's "social capital."

Putnam does not place the blame for this on one source, but cites the entrance of women into the workforce, high levels of divorce, and urban sprawl among others as possible contributors. His most damning remarks are reserved for television. According to Putnam, no single technology has had such a damaging effect on America's civic and personal relationships. I enjoyed his attack on TV on a personal level because I decided 5 years ago to throw away my television and have never looked back.

Certainly, Putnam's concerns are not new. He admits to this and provides the reader with an excellent look at the Progressive Era when American's decided to solve the vexing problems of an industialized urban society by forming civic clubs and actively involving themselves in their community.

This is not a particularly fun book to read. In summary, it details how Americans have become spectators on life. The recent success of "reality based" television programs only illustrates how we have traded the potential richness of personal relationships for a false reality on our television screens. Life is about personal relationships, and it is sad to see how Americans have avoided these relationships.

Putnam is not all gloom and doom. As with everything, hope abounds. After reading this book, one should only be encouraged to find ways to involve himself or herself in their communities and invite the neighbors over for a BBQ. This is an important social commentary, and I encourage all to read it.

When I first came across the idea that Robert Putnam wrote about in his 1995 article Bowling Alone, I felt like a whole new world and language had been openned up to me. Every thing he writes about in his book is familiar, and yet it is fresh and insightful. The crux of the matter is that our social connectedness is diminishing. Social capital, or the value that exists in the level of trust and reciprocity between individuals, institutions and communities needs to be strengthen. This isn't just about being better people or having a stronger economy. This is about the network of relationships that determine whether a society, both local and national, can meet the challenges of its problems, and thereby sustain a high quality of life.

Putnam's book should be read as an exercise in building social capital. By this I mean, you should distribute it to friends, family, coworkers, neighbors and especially elected officials in your community. Then plan to meet and discuss it over lunch or coffee. This book has the potential for being the most significant book on society in a generation. When we scratch our heads and wonder why in the midst of a booming economy, we have such tragic social dysfunction in our society, you can look to Putnam's book as a perspective that offers promise that social capitalism is a signficant aspect of the answer.

I'm writing this review for non-sociologists and non-policy experts, for people like me who don't generally curl up with a book of sociology. "Bowling Alone" is an important work because it highlights some very disturbing trends at work in America and suggests some solutions.

Author Robert Putnam measures "social capital," which is simply the value of people dealing with people--organization and communication, whether it's formal (church council, the PTA), or informal (the neighborhood tavern, the weekly card game). We have suffered a huge drop in such "social capital" over the past 30-35 years; club attendance has fallen by more than half, church attendance is off, home entertaining is off, even card games are off by half. (Yes, there are people who survey for that!)

Why is this important? Because a society that is rich in social capital is healthier, both for the group and for the individual. The states that have the highest club membership and voter turnouts also have the most income equality and the best schools (and those that have the lowest, have the worst). And according to Putnam, "if you decide to join [a group], you can cut your risk of dying over the next year in half." Younger people are demonstrably less social than their grandparents in the World War II generation. They also feel more malaise. Lack of sociability makes people feel worse.

While "Bowling Alone" is a work of academic sociology, with charts and graphs, Putnam makes it as reader-friendly as possible with a good honest prose style and a straightforward presentation. His message deserves to be heard. He also suggests some ways for us to get out of our current blight of social disconnectedness, including a call for the USA to re-live the organizational renaissance we once experienced at the turn of the last century, the Progressive Era, which spawned so many organizations like the Sierra Club, PTA and Girl Scouts that are still with us and going strong.

If you read only one book of sociology this decade, make it "Bowling Alone." The research is astounding, the presentation is great, and the message is one we need to hear.

This book will be a fascinating, illuminating, and provocative read for anyone who is interested in the social ties that constitute neighborhood, community and nation. Putnam expands on his earlier article in The American Prospect by looking for confirmation of his hypothesis (Americans have become less connected to social networks than they once were) in virtually every corner of our society. From bowling leagues to the workplace to parenthood to television, this has the potential to be a foundational piece of scholarship in the study of 'social capital.' There is also ample material for critical response -- Putnam makes a number of claims and conclusions that need the clarification of further research. Yet, this is one of the refreshing things about this book -- it invites us into a debate about the state of American communities and provides us with impressive tools and data with which to begin. Disclaimer: This reviewer recently completed a seminar with Putnam, and may therefore be more enthusiastic about the subject than he would expect others to be.

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone is a well-planned and exhaustively researched examination of America's civic and social participation. Few bestselling books have 60 pages of endnotes, over 100 charts and tables, and an index spanning 45 pages. If for no other reason, nonprofit sector professionals should buy this book for its statistical and reference data alone. However, this book is far more than a reference volume; it uses data to tell a compelling story about America's civic and social involvement in the 20th century.

The data reported in the book confirm all kinds of influences that have been discussed by public policy experts, social researchers, and watercooler gossips for years -- declining civic club memberships; fewer people willing to take leadership positions in PTA, Boy Scouts, school boards, city councils, and countless other "community-building" pursuits. Mr. Putnam addresses changing lifestyles, from two-paycheck and single-parent families to the increasing time consumed by home-workplace commuting, television, and other "cocooning" activities that reduce time and energy for "other-directed" activity.

The book's subtitle, "The Collapse and Revival of American Community," is an apt description of the book that has been misunderstood by many of its critics. Although Professor Putnam (Public Policy professor at Harvard) spends much of the book demonstrating the decline of civic & social involvement and community in America during the last third of our century, he also discusses possible causal factors and even offers suggestions for renewal.

The book's final chapter compares America's late 19th century with the late 20th century. He identifies numerous similarities that, he believes, point the way to addressing the current crisis as he sees it. The chapter includes italicized goals for improvement in civic and social involvement.

The topic and thesis of the book, originally raised in a 1995 magazine article, will be with us for several more years. The Ford Foundation and a group of community foundations have given Mr. Putnam $1 million to conduct additional research on how communities are addressing community-building issues and how effective those initiatives are.

The exhaustive research, enduring interest in the topic, and guaranteed future events related to this book and author are three of many reasons why this book should be on all reference bookshelves. More importantly, Mr. Putnam challenges our assumptions and offers an important lens though which to view the social and civic habits of our co-workers, volunteers, friends, family, and, ultimately, ourselves.

Wow! Once again an academic with an important piece of the truth about the nature of contemporary social reality has become embroiled in an avalanche of escalating public expectations and hyperbole until suddenly he is expected to be some kind of social prophet who's singularly able to explain, detail and unravel the heretofore-mysterious elements of our dilemma. Such is the case here with Professor Putnam's provocative findings regarding social disintegration in the America of the `90s.

This is an absorbing book, the result of Putnam's efforts to expand a short article Putnam had written regarding the observable facts of increasing social isolation and personal disconnection within our culture. Here he employs new data substantiating and extending the details of his original thesis, indicating that on almost every measure investigated, individual Americans are less likely to regularly socialize with their peers, becoming more isolated, more fractious, and less friendly to others than they have been in the recent past. The book is written in an engaging way, and entertains and seduces the reader with amusing (as well as frightening) facts and figures regarding the degree of animosity and alienation individual citizens feel.

Of course, it is easy to become so enthralled with reading through the entertaining list of particulars he enumerates than to pay heed to the burgeoning shapes and images lurking beneath the data; i.e., concerned readers should engage themselves in locating all this information usefully within a meaningful social context. Increasing social isolation and the progressive breakdown in what sociologists call social cohesion are not new phenomena, but have been steadily eroding the social fabric and our feelings of connectedness to one another for over a century. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber were warning of the social dangers associated with the rise of a rational, secular and materialistic social milieu. Reading other recent books such as Sales Kirkpatrick's "Rebels Against The Future" or Philip Slater's classic 1970 book "Pursuit of Loneliness" give one a much better grounding in how the degree of social isolation and civil alienation are related to what is happening in the larger social surround individuals find themselves in.

In essence, the kinds of isolation detailed so well in this tome are the result of the long-term corrosive effects of materialism, with concentration on capital acquisition and gaining more wealth and more affluent lifestyles. Indeed, if one reads the recent book "The Overworked American" by Juliet Schor, one gets the distinct impression that many Americans are so focused on "getting ahead' that anything interfering with this obsessive reach for greater material security gets short shrift in contemporary society. There should be no confusion about the nature of the problem that confronts us; we have no community because we have no culture left. The revolution of scientific change and technical innovation has systematically swept away the web of meanings we once had to integrate and make sense of all this. All we really have today is a mutual acquisition society, based primarily on our mutual lust for material goods and minimally constrained by the skeletal rules and regulations civil society sets for the nature of the material quest. This is a terrific book. Read it.

On the positive side, Putnam's thesis is both important and fascinating. There is a ton of food for thought in this well written, thought-provoking and somewhat depressing scholarly work. Moreover, Putnam backs up his conclusions with solid, nearly overwhelming, evidence. I also thought that Chapter 6 (informal social connections) was particularly interesting because for most Americans, it is these connections that are of most importance. Section III (explaining the dropoff in social interactions) was also particularly excellent. The chapter on technology and mass media contains the most compelling evidence one will ever see for the dangers of television. For these reasons, I would certainly recommend the book to anyone interested in the state of American society, circa 2000. (I wonder what Toqueville would say if he were doing his travels now rather than in the 1830's and 1840's?)

Havis said this, I could not quite bring myself to give the book 5 stars. So much of it was SO dense and statistic-laden that moving through much of the book was like walking through a 2-foot snowdrift--every step a chore. Not all of the book was like this, mind you, but alot of it was. Instead of 400 pages of text and 100 pages of footnotes and appendices, it might have been better if those numbers were reversed.

Finally, I must comment on the many charts in Section 4 which show all of the correlations between levels of social capital in various States and various quality of life measures (health, violence, TV watching, crime, etc.) Based on these charts, if someone were coming to this country for the first time with their family and deciding where to settle, they would be foolish not to settle in one of the Dakotas, which scored first and second on just about every quality of life index. But something must be wrong with this picture. It just isn't too often that you hear people singing the praises of North Dakota or South Dakota as being Nirvana-like places to live (or about people moving there in droves). The same is true for the other states that scored well--e.g. Nebraska, Montana, etc. Maybe the depressing message is that the only way to have high levels of social capital (and all of the posiitve things that go with it) in 21st century America is to live in a place where there is so little going on and where the climate may be lousy, that people are forced to interact with another on a more frequent basis than if one lived in say, San Francisco. If so, that's a real Hobson's choice. You have a choice of living in a place where there is great community life (because there is nothing to do other than community life in that area) or live in place that has many more inherently desirable characteristics and far lower levels of social capital (and all the negatives that go with that). Perhaps it is too stark to present the choice this way, but that certainly seems to be the message to be derived from Putnam's charts.

Putnam's research on the decline of social interaction is extensive, and the book is interesting to read. In Bowling Alone's first nine chapters are graphs showing the chrononical trends for every activity from card-playing to church-going. Putnam shows that Baby Boomers and Generation Xers are significantly less involved in civic activities than their parents and grandparents.

However, while Bowling Alone does a good job illustrating the loss of community involvement, the last fifteen chapters of the book, which discuss the causes of civic disengagement, and how it can be reversed, are seriously wrong. Just to start, Putnam overlooks many of the events of the last forty years. He pejoratively notes that Americans have become more individualist and distrustful of institutions, but he gives little notice to the Vietnam War, Watergate, the failed War on Poverty, and the inummerable political, corporate, and institutional scandals, which have led to this culture of skepticism.

Furthermore, the book ignores the role of centralized government and litigiousness in weakening communities. People are less likely to vote or get involved in political affairs because top-down bureaucratic mandates and endless lawsuits have undermined local democracy. Putnam laments the drop in the number of Americans who vote, attend town meetings, or write to their Congressman, but does not realize that much of this apathy is comes from the fact that many Americans perhaps rightly believe that these activities are a waste of time. Why should a person give up several hours of their time to go to a town meeting when any decision of significance made at the meeting may be overturned by a federal judge or blocked by a Washington bureaucrat?

The whole book is permeated with an irritating longing for Babbitt-like organizationalism. Many American do informally interact with their families, friends, and coworkers, but have absolutely no interest joining a fraternal organization, with its secret handshakes and exclusive membership. Likewise, many Americans do give their time time and money to causes (e.g. environmentalism) that they support, but are unwilling to make donations to large, poorly-run charities who have nebullous goals (e.g., United Way, Red Cross). Unfortunately, Putnam seems to overlook the decentralizing social trends of the last several decades.

The last two chapters of the book are the absolute worst. He expresses some concern that communitarians need to avoid the 'big-brotherism' of the early twentieth century Progressive movement, but then offers some of his own proposals (e.g., more urban planning, campaign finance reform) which themselves seem heavy-handed.

In spite of these criticism, I do recommend the book. Public apathy is a serious problem, and though I disagree with some of Putnam's conclusions, the book is informative and well-written.

It amazes me how often an academic with an important piece of the truth about the nature of contemporary social reality becomes embroiled in an avalanche of escalating public expectations & hyperbole until suddenly he is expected to become a hopped-up social prophet singularly able to explain, detail and unravel the heretofore-mysterious elements of our existential dilemma. Such is the case here with Professor Putnam's provocative findings regarding social disintegration in the America of the `90s.

This is an absorbing book, the result of Putnam's efforts to expand a short article Putnam had written regarding the observable facts of increasing social isolation and personal disconnection within our culture. Here he employs new data substantiating and extending the details of his original thesis, indicating that on almost every measure investigated, individual Americans are less likely to regularly socialize with their peers, becoming more isolated, more fractious, and less friendly to others than they have been in the recent past. The book is written in an engaging way, and entertains and seduces the reader with amusing (as well as frightening) facts and figures regarding the degree of animosity and alienation individual citizens feel.

Of course, it is easy to become so enthralled with reading through the entertaining list of particulars he enumerates than to pay heed to the burgeoning shapes and images lurking beneath the data; i.e., concerned readers should engage themselves in locating all this information usefully within a meaningful social context. Increasing social isolation and the progressive breakdown in what sociologists call social cohesion are not new phenomena, but have been steadily eroding the social fabric and our feelings of connectedness to one another for over a century. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber were warning of the social dangers associated with the rise of a rational, secular and materialistic social milieu. Reading other recent books such as Sales Kirkpatrick's "Rebels Against The Future" or Philip Slater's classic 1970 book "Pursuit of Loneliness" give one a much better grounding in how the degree of social isolation and civil alienation are related to what is happening in the larger social surround individuals find themselves in.

In essence, the kinds of isolation detailed so well in this tome are the result of the long-term corrosive effects of materialism, with concentration on capital acquisition and gaining more wealth and more affluent lifestyles. Indeed, if one reads the recent book "The Overworked American" by Juliet Schor, one gets the distinct impression that many Americans are so focused on "getting ahead' that anything interfering with this obsessive reach for greater material security gets short shrift in contemporary society. There should be no confusion about the nature of the problem that confronts us; we have no community because we have no culture left. The revolution of scientific change and technical innovation has systematically swept away the web of meanings we once had to integrate and make sense of all this. All we really have today is a mutual acquisition society, based primarily on our mutual lust for material goods and minimally constrained by the skeletal rules and regulations civil society sets for the nature of the material quest. This is a terrific book. Read it.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Robert Putnam, Simon & Schuster, 2000

Review

If you can read only one purportedly academic book this year choose this one. Despite being statistically dense, it reads like a business bestseller - a sort of Tipping Point with meat. Through a exhaustive use of polling and other socioeconomic indices, Putnam paints a compelling picture of a nation fragmenting into smaller and smaller pockets of disjointed individuals. A must read for anyone interested in political action into the next decades.

Synopsis

The basic premise here is that a growing social disconnect can be identified in trends of American public opinion over the course of the last century though analysis of "social capital" activities. Social capital is the connection - and the strength, utility and cohesion of these linkages - between individuals in a society.

Rather than a lamentation on this collapse of civics, Putnam traces polling, voting, memberships and leisure activities to debunk most of the myths that attempt to explain the failure of politics to engage the US public. We still have the same 19-20 hours for relaxation per week and work, with its focal points of `team' capitalism and heightened customer service does not seemingly translate outside the office. By then bringing in Tocqueville's `self interest, rightly served' [135] a clear trail of the decline of American civility is clearly traced.

The salient thought roaring through Bowling Alone is that "A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter." [21] This is the basic finding that such a simple premise forms the basis of all the political upheavals in America - and with little retinking, Canada - over the past century and of greater importance, since the silent reversal - `disjunctive pattern of decline' - of civic connectives in the middle 70's.

The criticisms of Bowling Alone hinge primarily on the seeming Ozzie & Harriet lamentation for the good old days [see Mark Kingwell's The World We Want, 2000] when everyone liked each other, but they sorely miss the point of the work. Given that more people bowl in leagues than voted in the 1998 US congressional election , perhaps a look-see at Pleasantville is warranted. Putnam's prescriptions are not `civic broccoli' or predicated on the ubiquitous they coming to our rescue, but simple, easy to articulate and ultimately deliverable.

Detail

Putnam typifies 2-type of social capital: bonding and bridging which provides a useful distinction in the book. Bonding capital coalesces similar groups while bridging arches socioeconomic groups. This differentiation provides Although this is a subtle distinction it is at the core of the thesis of Bowling Alone. It allows for a plausible explanation of the rise of chequebook participation and the proliferation of letterheads over civic action by individuals. Collective goals and causes have become secondary to personal growth with thin and cool trust.

Putnam's exploration of the causes of this decline follows leads from the number of personal injury lawyers, through television into bureaucratization of community action. He sees troubling social tendencies to `hire organizations' for community action and the development of virtual social capital consciousness, which must be regarded as oxymoronic at best. These activities become captives of zealot `dictators' or dilute their effectiveness as they denigrate into gab-feast anarchies. Thus, Putnam questions the effectiveness of the internet as a tool of bonding social capital as it has a tendency to create joy-stick democracy of the paramount individual. This "sociological Astroturf, suitable only where the real thing won't grow." [107]

Thus, although widespread discontent exists, incumbents are re-elected as astonishing rates in America as there are few focal points for the coalescing social disconnect. This raises the specter of niche markets in politics where single issue consumers' end up supporting causes that in effect erode the social cohesion of their communities. This finding is most troubling for today's youth whose values are filtered through the abstraction of the media - and especially by television the "single most consistent predicator" [229] of declining civic involvement - and are tuned out to organized civic action.

Overall, Putnam provides clear and compelling evidence that a catalyst is needed to re-engage Americans in collective civic action to address pressing social and growing economic ills that face the nation. Or in a chilling insight, he believes that we are bottoming out in "drive-by" civics.