Combining theoretical approaches with practical applications, Rethinking Social Capital delineates the meaning, uses, and problems surrounding the concept of social capital. Carl Bankston, a leading scholar in the field, offers a fresh take on the topic, presenting an original way of understanding social capital as a process. The book provides key definitions of social capital, describing its functionality, the surrounding theoretical issues, and its relationship with social structure. Examining capital in its various forms, Bankston discusses the complications of defining social relationships in a financial resource analogy as investments in future outcomes, and proposes an alternative of an original structural model that approaches social capital as a process. Chapters then explore the major applications of social capital theory: to families, communities and education; to formal organizations and informal networks; to class, race, ethnicity and inequality; and to the nation-state. This cutting-edge book is invaluable in clarifying ambiguities surrounding the concept of social capital to students and scholars of the social sciences. Its practical applications will also prove useful to policy makers and public policy institutes.

After over half a century of court-directed efforts to redress the historical educational chasm between blacks and whites in the United States, both the past achievements and the future direction of school desegregation are uncertain. Too often, the early gains made in racially desegregating America's schools seem to have been halted, and in many cases reversed. Urban school decay is once again on the rise, with predictable consequences. For the very poorest minority students, who have limited educational options apart from dangerous, deteriorating neighbourhood schools, drop-out rates are high, standardised test scores are abysmally low, and violence is an everyday fact of life. The gulf between the unskilled, marginalised students being warehoused in these predominantly poor, minority schools on the one hand, and the increasingly high tech society they cannot compete in on the other, is growing. This ground-breaking book presents the viewpoints and research of some of the most prominent scholars in the field of school desegregation. It covers virtually the entire spectrum of thinking and scholarship on school desegregation and its promise, success, necessity, pitfalls and failures.

Affirmative action is one of the most controversial policies of our time. This book provides a succinct but comprehensive account of the historical background of affirmative action, including the complicated racial history that gave rise to it and the changing meaning of affirmative action in government and law, giving special attention to the role of the civil rights movement. The book traces the major court decisions that have defined how affirmative action policies in education and employment may be used and that have defined the limitations of these policies. It gives particular attention to the emergence of the diversity rationale and to how this became the central legal justification for affirmative action. The book describes how the Supreme Court has been as divided as American society in general on the question of affirmative action. It discusses the relevance of the changing composition of the American population for affirmative action, giving special attention to the Latino and Asian groups that have been the greatest part of demographic change in the United States. It considers the ways in which diversity has become a complicated concept in this changing society. These pages also devote attention to arguments that racial and ethnic affirmative action should be replaced by efforts of socioeconomic affirmative action that would be more relevant to contemporary American society. Following this discussion of social and economic change, this brief volume examines the different ways in which affirmative action is a problematic approach to social inequality. The book suggests that inequality is deeply rooted in social networks and cultural patterns, and that inequality therefore does not lend itself to redesign through planning. It suggests, further, that affirmative action is based on the idea that upward mobility can be selectively encouraged across groups, without recognizing that universal upward movement is not possible. It provides an even-handed consideration of the mismatch, qualification and stigma arguments. Finally, the book looks at the possible future of affirmative action, considering pressures working against preferential policies in employment, education and the substantial support that these policies will continue to have.

Caldas and Bankston provide a critical, dispassionate analysis of why desegregation in the United States has failed to achieve the goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all students. They offer case histories through dozens of examples of failed desegregation plans from all over the country. The book takes a very broad perspective on race and education, situated in the larger context of the development of individual rights in Western civiliztion. The book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America. The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an ideal racial balance in schools. It describes how social capital—a positive outcome of social interaction between and among parents, children, and teachers—creates strong bonds that lead to high academic achievement. The authors show how coercive desegregation weakens bonds and hurts not only students and schools, but also entire communities. Examples from all parts of the United States show how parents undermined desegregation plans by seeking better educational alternatives for their children rather than supporting the public schools to which their children were assigned. Most important, this book offers an alternative, more realistic viewpoint on class, race, and education in America.