You may remember ASK’s previous interview with Dr. Richardson Dilworth pertaining to his book, The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy. Dilworth, a Professor of History and Politics at Drexel University, recently edited a new book, Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia, and was kind enough to answer a few more questions.

: How did editing Social Capital in the City differ from writing a book?

Dr. Richard Dilworth: As you might expect, editing a book, at least in my experience, was a more social process than writing a book. Instead of doing the writing myself, I was giving people editorial comments to try to direct their writing in a way that would provide the book with some cohesion. It's the big fear with an edited book that the individual writers will spin off in their own directions and you'll end up with a bunch of disparate chapters that don't say much as a whole. You have that same concern in writing a book, but not to the same extent. And the other big difference is that, in writing a book, you have to try to keep yourself to deadlines. In editing a book, you face the much larger challenge of keeping other people to writing deadlines.

: What audience were you thinking of when you were editing the book? Do you think it can or will appeal to readers outside of the Philadelphia region?

RD: The book was designed to appeal to both people with a specific interest in Philadelphia and also to people with a more general interest in the notion of social capital and social networks in big cities. From what I can tell, local bookstores are, not surprisingly, putting the book in their "regional interest" sections.

: How would you define “social capital” to your readers?

RD: Social capital is a term that became wildly popular across a broad swath of academia in the 1990s, and it continues to be popular today. It became so popular, and was used in so many different ways, that it has become almost more of a catch phrase than an analytic term. At worst, the term is used to describe some sort of soft-and-fuzzy sense of community togetherness. I personally think the term is best used to describe the ways in which social networks are used for individual economic gain. Part of the point of applying the term to Philadelphia is that this city is hardly a soft-and-fuzzy place, as one look at the murder and violent assault rates can tell you. I was intrigued by looking at the myriad ways in which social networks are used for economic gain in a place like Philadelphia.

To reflect the different ways in which "social capital" can be used, I asked each author to explicitly define the term in their chapters. The book can thus be viewed as in part an exercise in the different ways a single academic term can be used to describe social networks in a single place. There are some interesting differences in the way each author uses the term, but most stick to the definition given by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone: "By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital – tools and training that enhance individual productivity – the core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value.”