Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This timely volume puts emphasis on the effect of social capital on everyday life: how the routines of daily life lead people to get involved in their communities. Focussing on its micro-level causes and consequences, the book's international contributors argue that social capital is fundamentally concerned with the value of social networks and about how people interact with each other.
The book suggests that different modes of participation have different consequences for creating - or destroying - a sense of community or participation. The diversity of countries, institutions and groups dealt with - from Indian castes to Dutch churches, from highly competent 'everyday makers' in Scandinavia to politics-avoiding Belgian women and Irish villagers - offers fascinating case studies, and theoretical reflections for the present debates about civil society and democracy.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Social capital: the missing link?
• 3 Social capital in a multicultural society: the case of Canada
• 4 The different faces of social capital in NSW Australia
• 5 Studying civic culture ethnographically and what it tells us about social capital: communities in the West of Ireland
• 6 Traditional communities, caste and democracy: the Indian mystery
• 7 Religion and volunteering in the Netherlands
• 8 Volunteering and social capital: how trust and religion shape civic participation in the United States
• 9 'Getting to trust': an analysis of the importance of institutions, families, personal experiences and group membership
• 10 Membership and democracy
• 11 The Everyday Maker: building political rather than social capital
• 12 'Not for our kind of people': the sour-grapes phenomenon as a casual mechanism for political passivity
• 13 The social in social capital

Author notes provided by Syndetics