BOWLING ALONE Read online

  In addition, a surprisingly large and growing fraction of the American workforce has “contingent” or “nonstandard” jobs—part-time employees, temps, “independent contractors” (consultants), “on-call” workers (such as substitute teachers), and the like. The best recent studies suggest that nearly 30 percent of all U.S. workers fall into this broad category, about one-half of them part-timers and another one-quarter independent contractors. Temping and part-time work both appear to be growing. Many workers—software programmers, for example, or management consultants, or parents who seek to combine work and family obligations—are in these irregular jobs by choice and find them rewarding both personally and financially. Apart from high-status consultants, however, most people in nonstandard jobs say that they would prefer regular, full-time, noncontingent employment.32

  More important for our purposes, all these structural changes in the work-place—shorter job tenure, more part-time and temporary jobs, and even independent consultancy—inhibit workplace-based social ties. Three-quarters of all independent contractors have no regular work colleagues. Part-time workers have only two-thirds as many friends from work as do full-time workers. Friendships at work decrease with job instability, even when the job changes are voluntary. None of these patterns is surprising in the least, since successful investment in social capital takes time and concerted effort. Birds of passage, whether by choice or by necessity, generally don’t nest. The implication is clear—nearly one-third of all U.S. workers have jobs that discourage durable social connections, and that fraction is rising.33

  In short, some features of contemporary American work life—more time at work, more emphasis on teamwork—would seem to foster informal work-place social capital, while other features—downsizing, the fraying of ties to a particular firm, the rise of contingent work—point in the opposite direction. The impact of another potentially important factor—changing office technology, especially e-mail—is harder to evaluate systematically at this point; the general effect of computer-mediated communication on social capital is discussed in chapter 9.

  As I have noted, hard evidence on long-term trends in the frequency of water-cooler discussions of civic affairs or the incidence of close friendships among co-workers is apparently nonexistent. A weaker form of indirect evidence, however, is available through surveys of job satisfaction. Many studies have shown that social connections with co-workers are a strong predictor— some would say the strongest single predictor—of job satisfaction. People with friends at work are happier at work.34 If social capital at work has risen significantly in recent decades, presumably that should show up in warmer feelings about work, at least if we control for adverse changes in financial and job security.

  In 1955 and again in the 1990s Gallup pollsters asked working Americans, “Which do you enjoy more, the hours when you are on your job, or the hours when you are not on your job?” In 1955, 44 percent of all workers said they preferred the hours on the job, but by 1999 barely one-third as many (16 percent) felt that way. According to Roper polls, the proportion of Americans “completely satisfied” with their job fell from 46 percent in the mid-1970s to 36 percent in 1992. Some of this disaffection is traceable to concerns about job security and personal finances, but even controlling for financial security, the General Social Survey reveals a modest long-term slippage (roughly 10 percent overall) in job satisfaction between 1972 and 1998. Recent surveys suggest that as many as one in four employees are chronically angry on the job, and many researchers believe that incivility and aggression in the workplace are on the rise.35 Not all survey data point in the same direction, but the balance of evidence appears to be that, quite apart from material insecurity, American workers are certainly no happier in the workplace today than a generation ago and probably are less happy. That evidence is hard to square with the hypothesis that the workplace has become the new locus of Americans’ social solidarity and sense of community.

  Our judgment must be cautious here. Unlike most other domains of sociability discussed in this volume, in this particular area we lack definitive evidence one way or the other. As will become clear in section V, my own view is that any solution to the problem of civic disengagement in contemporary America must include better integration between our work lives and our community and social lives. Nevertheless, a final note of skepticism is necessary about the workplace as the new public square for American communities. In the end, “work” entails time and effort destined to serve primarily material, not social, ends. Work-based networks are often used for instrumental purposes, thus somewhat undercutting their value for community and social purposes. As Alan Wolfe observes:

  Because we form such ties to promote the highly secular activities of getting and spending, friendships and connections developed at work are generally assumed to have a more instrumental character: we use people, and they use us, to solicit more business, advance our careers, sell more products, or demonstrate our popularity…. If so, it follows that even if the decline of civil ties in the neighborhood is being compensated by new ties formed at work, the instrumental character of the latter cannot be an adequate substitute for the loss of the former.36

  Moreover, when at work, our time is our employer’s, not our own. We are paid to work, not to build social capital, and our employer has the legal right to draw the line between the two. Court decisions have given employers wide latitude to monitor and control communications in the workplace, and monitoring is in fact increasing rapidly, facilitated by the ease of intercepting electronic communications. A private employer may fire workers for what they say, as well as for their political views or activities. According to a 1999 survey by the American Management Association, two-thirds of employers record employee voice mail, e-mail, or phone calls, review computer files, or videotape workers, and such surveillance is becoming more common. Rights of free speech and privacy that are essential to public deliberation and private solidarity are, to put it mildly, insecure in the workplace. Substantial reforms in public law and private practice would be necessary before the water cooler could become the equivalent of the back fence or the town square.37

  Most of us nowadays are employed, and most of the time most of us work with other people. In that fundamental sense, the workplace is a natural site for connecting with others. However, the balance of the evidence speaks against the hopeful hypothesis that American social capital has not disappeared but simply moved into the workplace. Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century are demonstrably less likely than our parents were to join with our co-workers in formal associations. New forces that might foster socializing in the workplace are counterbalanced by equally new forces that inhibit the types of social ties, durable yet flexible and wide-ranging, that are important to civic life and personal well-being. In addition, for the one American adult in three who is not employed, workplace ties are nonexistent. The workplace is not the salvation for our fraying civil society.

  CHAPTER 6

  Informal Social Connections

  SO FAR we have mostly explored the formal ways in which Americans connect with their communities—through political parties, civic associations, churches, unions, and the like. Far more frequent, however, are the informal connections that we strike up—getting together for drinks after work, having coffee with the regulars at the diner, playing poker every Tuesday night, gossiping with the next-door neighbor, having friends over to watch TV, sharing a barbecue picnic on a hot summer evening, gathering in a reading group at the bookstore, even simply nodding to another regular jogger on the same daily route. Like pennies dropped in a cookie jar, each of these encounters is a tiny investment in social capital.*

  In Yiddish, men and women who invest lots of time in formal organizations are often termed machers—that is, people who make things happen in the community. By contrast, those who spend many hours in informal conversation and communion are termed schmoozers. This distinction mirrors an important reality in American social life.1Machers foll
ow current events, attend church and club meetings, volunteer, give to charity, work on community projects, give blood, read the newspaper, give speeches, follow politics, and frequent local meetings. Statistically speaking, doing any one of these activities substantially increases your likelihood of doing the others. People who work on community projects are likely to be churchgoers, newspaper readers to be volunteers, club-goers to be interested in politics, and blood givers to attend meetings. Machers are the all-around good citizens of their communities.

  Schmoozers have an active social life, but by contrast to machers, their engagement is less organized and purposeful, more spontaneous and flexible. They give dinner parties, hang out with friends, play cards, frequent bars and night spots, hold barbecues, visit relatives, and send greeting cards. Again, doing any one of these things is significantly associated with doing the others, too. All involve, in the felicitous expression of Alexander Pope, “the flow of soul.”

  The two types of social involvement overlap to some extent—major-league machers are often world-class schmoozers, and vice versa. Some social settings fall into a gray area between the formal and the informal—a bridge club or a Shriners gathering, for example. Nevertheless, as an empirical matter, the two syndromes are largely distinct—many people are active in one sphere but not the other. And many people do neither; they are not involved in community affairs, and they don’t spend much time with friends and acquaintances.

  This distinction between machers and schmoozers—between formal and informal social connectedness—reflects differences in social standing, life cycle, and community attachment.2Machers tend to be better educated and to have higher incomes, whereas informal social involvement is common at all levels in the social hierarchy. Formal community involvement is relatively modest early in life, peaks in late middle age, and then declines with retirement. Informal social involvement follows the opposite path over the life cycle, peaking among young adults, entering a long decline as family and community obligations press in, then rising again with retirement and widowhood. Single people spend more time and energy in schmoozing. For both men and women, marriage increases time spent at home and in formal community organizations, while reducing the time spent with friends. Having children cuts further into informal social connectedness, while adding to formal community involvement. Machers are disproportionately homeowners and longtime residents, schmoozers are renters and frequent movers. “Settling down” means, among other things, exchanging informal ties for more formal ones, shifting the balance between hanging out with friends and participating in community affairs.

  Historically, machers (except for those involved in religious life) have tended to be disproportionately male, but the entry of women into the paid labor force has shown that employment, not gender, is the primary key to formal community involvement. Informal social connections are much more frequent among women, regardless of their job and marital status. Married or single, employed or not, women make 10–20 percent more long-distance calls to family and friends than men, are responsible for nearly three times as many greeting cards and gifts, and write two to four times as many personal letters as men. Women spend more time visiting with friends, though full-time work blurs this gender difference, by trimming friendship time for both sexes. Keeping up with friends and relatives continues to be socially defined as women’s work.* Even in adolescence (and not only in the United States), women are more likely to express a sense of concern and responsibility for the welfare of others—for example, by doing volunteer work more frequently. Although American boys and girls in the 1990s used computers almost equally, boys were more likely to use them to play games, while girls were more likely to use them for e-mail. Sociologist Claude S. Fischer concludes that “discounting their fewer opportunities for social contact, women are more socially adept and intimate than men, for whatever reasons—psychological constitution, social structure, childhood experiences, or cultural norms.” In short, women are more avid social capitalists than men.3

  Both the macher and the schmoozer can be found in all corners of our society. Businessmen schmooze in country clubs in Palm Springs, and young welfare moms are machers in community-based organizations in Appalachia. The highest frequency of card playing in America is among working-class housewives of the Great Plains.4 When philosophers speak in exalted tones of “civic engagement” and “democratic deliberation,” we are inclined to think of community associations and public life as the higher form of social involvement, but in everyday life, friendship and other informal types of sociability provide crucial social support. To be sure, informal connections generally do not build civic skills in the ways that involvement in a club, a political group, a union, or a church can, but informal connections are very important in sustaining social networks. So in our inventory of social capital in America, we need to pay special attention to trends in schmoozing .

  VISITING WITH FRIENDS and acquaintances has long been one of the most important social practices in America. The early nineteenth century in New England, as historian Karen V. Hansen has shown, was “a very social time.”

  The many types of visiting ranged from pure socializing to communal labor: visitors took afternoon tea, made informal Sunday visits, attended maple sugar parties and cider tastings, stayed for extended visits, offered assistance in giving birth, paid their respects to the family of the deceased, participated in quilting parties, and raised houses and barns. Visits lasted from a brief stopover, or a “call,” to a leisurely afternoon, to a month-long stay. Visitors frequently stayed overnight. The difficulty of travel—particularly in winter, by foot, horse, stage, wagon, or train—created barriers to visiting but did not deter visitors who highly valued their contact with neighbors and kin. It was through visiting, in fact, that they created their communities.5

  Some early sociologists thought that this thicket of informal social connection would not survive a transplant to the anonymous city, that urbanization would doom both friendship and extended kinship. However, experience showed that even in the most densely populated urban settings, social filaments linking residents were steadily regenerated.6 The density of social connections is lower in cities—the average resident of Los Angeles knows a smaller fraction of her neighbors than does the average resident of a farming village in the Central Valley, and the Angeleña’s friends are likely to live farther away— but twentieth-century urbanization was not fatal to friendship. Urban settings sustain not a single, tightly integrated community, but a mosaic of loosely coupled communities. As mobility, divorce, and smaller families have reduced the relative importance of kinship ties, especially among the more educated, friendship may actually have gained importance in the modern metropolis.7The passage in popular culture from I Love Lucy and All in the Family to Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends exalts informal social ties.

  Like our New England forebears, Americans spend lots of time visiting. Five times during the 1980s and 1990s Roper pollsters asked Americans, “During the past week, how many times would you say you have gone out for entertainment—to a movie, to visit friends, to a sports event, to dinner, or whatever?” Nearly two-thirds of us reported going out at least once in the last week, and of those, fully half had gone to the home of friends for dinner, visiting, playing cards, and the like. Among other destinations for a night out, 4 percent had gone to a play or live concert, 11 percent to a sports event, 17 percent to a bar, disco, or other place of public entertainment, 18 percent to a movie, and slightly more than half to a restaurant for dinner.8 Across America, from big cities to tiny hamlets, spending an evening at home with friends is five to ten times more common than is going to the theater or a ball game.

  Several surveys between 1986 and 1990 also showed that schmoozers are more common than machers in contemporary America.9 (Figure 16 summarizes these results, highlighting the most relevant social activities.) Slightly more than one-quarter of all Americans had attended at least one meeting of a club or civic organization in the preceding mo
nth, and slightly more than one-third had gone to a church social function in that period—a respectable showing for such civic-minded events. During that same month, more than half of all Americans had had friends in for an evening, and nearly two-thirds had gone out to a friend’s home for an evening.10 One way or another, three-quarters of all Americans got together at home with friends at least once during that month, and the national average was three such soirees per month. Similarly, according to time diary data collected between 1965 and 1995, the average American spent roughly half an hour each week on organizational activity (not counting religion), but more than three hours a week visiting with friends.11