Bonds, Bridges and Bands
If you’ve read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (http://www.bowlingalone.com/)or Ron Burt’s Structural Holes (http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ronald.burt/research/SHNC.pdf), you will be very familiar with bonding and bridging capital. Bonds are those close knit ties between like actors in a network. Bridges are distant ties to actors with different attributes and access to unique resources. A strong community has a solid core of bonds along with strategic bridges to culturally diverse networks and power structures. This mix balances internal coherence with external opportunities.
To these ties I add banding capital. These are distant ties to those with similar attributes and interests and remain somewhat flexible over time. For people with disabilities this might be a formal organization like the Canadian Paraplegic Society or a less formal facebook group like people who have family and friends with cancer.
Social capital emerges as networks emerge. Networks are simply the structure formed by the connections between actors over time. Some networks are fleeting and may come and go as an issue emerges. Flash mobs are examples of a temporary network of people coming together in an instance and then disappearing in a flash (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U_kp1saG-g). Most community action is opposition to development and results in a hastily assembled action group. I would argue that more enduring structures (formal and informal) working together, across disabilities and embedded into socio-political structures would lead to more successful and sustainable solutions than we can achieve today in our disability specific silos that take advocacy-only stances.