Events

Lecture by Mario Luis Small, “Rethinking Social Capital”

Thursday April 08, 2010 - 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm

Mario Luis Small, Professor of Sociology and the College, University of Chicago, will give a lecture titled “Rethinking Social Capital,” based on his book Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. Location: 110 Boalt Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus. Free and open to the public.

 

Social capital theorists have shown that some people do better than others in part because they enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people’s deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, childcare centers, schools, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book illustrates and develops this argument by exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers.