The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays on Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship

6. Social and Cultural Capital in the Urban Ghetto: Implications for the Economic Sociology of Immigration

6 Social and Cultural Capital in the Urban Ghetto: Implications for the Economic Sociology of Immigration M. PATRICIA FERNANDEZ KELLY THE PURPOSE of this chapter is to examine the relationship between social and cultural capital. To achieve that end, I focus on early motherhood among impoverished ghetto women. The subject is of interest given differing perspectives that assign causal priority either to anomalous cultural norms and values or to situational factors . I resort to four sets of ideas derived from the field of economic sociology: (a) the effect of membership in social networks characterized by low levels of what Jeremy Boissevain calls multiplexity, that is, internal differentiation in terms of role, status, and field of activity ; (b) the ensuing truncation of social networks that shape the experience of the poor in ways that differ substantially from how they affect more affluent groups; (c) the distinction between social capital and the quality of resources that may be tapped through relationships of mutuality; and (d) the formation of cultural capital as a repertory of symbols and meanings interactively created and dependent on the conditions that generate social capital. Although the protagonists of my account are African Americans living in West Baltimore, the details of their experience have implications for the understanding of other populations threatened by pov213 214 The Economic Sociology of Immigration erty and insularity, including some recent immigrants and their children . Several authors have emphasized the immigrant antecedents of American blacks, their commonalities in profile and expectations with other immigrant groups as well as the divergences that eventuated in arrested social, economic, and political mobility. There is an ongoing relationship between ethnicity and migration. Today's ethnic minorities are the immigrants of yesterday and vice versa. With signal exceptions, current research on African Americans focuses not primarily on their immigrant past but on the distressing behavioral complex subsumed under the rubric of the urban underclass. Yet one way to envision the experience of impoverished African Americans is as an outcome of migration under particular circumstances. In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy, William Julius Wilson provides an analysis of the structural and cultural factors explaining the peculiarities of contemporary ghetto experience.! This analysis, which has proven to have a lasting impact on research and debate, gives priority to changes in the domestic economy that led to a constriction of the manufacturing sector , the ensuing eviction of vulnerable sectors of the black working class from formal employment, and their concentration in inner-city areas. While acknowledging the structural causes of ghetto poverty, Wilson also gives attention to aberrant behaviors that he attributes in large part to the departure of middle-class blacks to the suburbs. Left without ostensible ties to the labor market and viable role models , impoverished African Americans fell into a social abyss characterized by high rates of persistent unemployment, crime, welfare dependence, family atomization, and adolescent pregnancy. That interpretation, which combines economic and cultural dimensions , is paralleled by a conservative account which emphasizes deviant values and norms as well as the unintended consequences of welfare programs like Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Although designed to provide temporary relief, public assistance is said to have created incentives for permanent reliance on government support, idleness, and loose sexual behavior. Authors like Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead, among others, attribute ghetto pathologies to the excesses of liberal ideology and recommend stricter eligibility requirements as well as participation in training and employment programs as conditions for welfare grants.2 Both liberal and conservative readings of the malaise surrounding impoverished African Americans contain elements of truth. Wilson's insight about the relationship between changing economic conditions , class recomposition, and underclass behavior is substantiated by recent empirical research.3 The situational connection between Social and Cultural Capital in the Urban Ghetto 215 welfare dependence, persistent unemployment, and adolescent pregnancies is also borne out by the facts. What neither of the two views explains is the sequence of events that leads to specific behavioral outcomes among the poor, or the meaning that those events and resulting behaviors have for the actors engaged in them. I argue that the form and effects of cultural and social capital are defined by physical vectors, such as the characteristics of urban space, and by collective constructions, such as social class, race, and gender. The fragmentation of experience along those lines leads to multiple, often confounding, behavioral outcomes whose meaning is not...