Desigualdades Sociais, Redes de Sociabilidade e Participação Política (Social Inequalities, Sociability Networks, and Political Participation) (review)

Introduction

In Brazil, the most recommended readings in graduate sociology courses are dominated by Europeans. Few Brazilians are among the most read. Also, conspicuously under-represented are North Americans. Of the seven top Europeans, five (Weber, Bourdieu, Marx, Foucault and Durkheim) are dead.

A pernicious effect of the conceptual and theoretical alienation is that the Social Sciences do not provide answers to the major problems affecting Brazil—nor try to. The subjects taught are not related to those that the population expressed concerns. They are not grounded in time and space.

Research methods, in general, and Statistics, in particular, are painfully absent from course syllabi, congresses, articles, books, theses and dissertations. Nelson do Valle Silva is one of the few who researched and criticized these serious lacunae. He analyzed 308 articles published in the Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais (RBCS): 85% had no quantification whatsoever; 13% had univariate frequency distributions and only 8 (eight) articles, less than 3%, had any kind of statistical analysis. Of the eight authors, only one was fully trained in Brazil.

It is against this background of indifference, if not hostility, to quantitative sociology that Desigualdades Sociais, Redes de Sociabilidade e Participação Política should be read. It has an Introduction, eleven chapters and two appendixes. The contents are spread over different aspects of life in the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area. The book uses data from a survey. Sampling was multi-staging. The questionnaire has a considerable conceptual and theoretical spread. The Editor's focus was on inequality, stratification and mobility, with an eye on social capital, social networks and related concepts.

It discusses the usefulness of keeping human, cultural and social capital separate, and underlines the consequences of these concepts for more classic concerns such as occupation and income. Race, gender, violence, crime and fears, as well as political participation, apathy and trust—central issues in Brazil today that are dealt with in some detail.

A cursory inspection of the bibliography used in the various chapters reveals a far more balanced use of sources than the syllabi. The work of Brazilian and North-American social and political scientists is recognized, as is that of European researchers and thinkers, contemporary and "classic". However, references to researchers outside North America and Western Europe are scarce. Africa, Asia and other Latin American countries are absent.

Chapter One

The first chapter, by Antônio Augusto Pereira Prates, Flávio Alex de Oliveira Carvalhaes and Bráulio Figueiredo Alves Silva, deals with social capital and social networks. Joining Coleman, Granovetter and Burt, it makes a point of linking both and presents a balanced discussion. It cross-tabulates weak ties and social capital, expecting to find efficacy differentials among the resulting cells. They analyze an index of social capital. Age, in years, having 11 or more years of formal education and having lived for seven or more years in the neighborhood are the three surviving independent variables. Later they introduce "weak ties", measured by the presence in neighborhood meetings and in informal meetings with city officials, as an intervening variable. Access to ties enhances collective efficacy. Actually, only when weak ties are present does social capital influence efficacy.

Chapter Two

Jorge Alexandre Neves and Diogo Henrique Helal wrote the second chapter, retaining social capital and "associativismo" in their analysis of the labor market. They discuss two definitions of social capital, one that is an attribute of collectivities and another that may become an attribute of individuals and/or be used by them. They use Granovetter, Bourdieu and Portes to back the latter. They hypothesize that the greater the individual's social capital, the higher the likelihood that he/she will be employed even after controlling for SES (socioeconomic status) at birth and human capital. They use a multinomial logistic regression, based on the number of years of formal education, age...