Past Events

Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comTime converter at worldtimebuddy.com This week Samantha Stevens will give a presentation: “Cui bono and social capital: Understanding the white savior” followed by a discussion.Overview:In order to address the ongoing inaction by the Canadian government regarding mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows First Nations, my current research examines the moves to innocence enacted by the government. Using recent research on the white saviour trope and the legal concept of cui bono as central concepts, I am examining if social capital…

Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comTime converter at worldtimebuddy.com This week Beverly Sloan will give a presentation: “The Rural School Community Center” followed by a discussion. Summary:Short illustration on how a new school district supervisor in West Virginia raised community social capital and the impact of that social capital on the community. About the presenter:Beverly has a PhD in Organisational Leadership from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. She is a veteran of the United States Air Force with more than 32 years of…

This week David Williams will give a presentation: “Embedding Social Capital into the Value of the Firm” followed by a discussion. Traditional applications for Social Capital focus on individuals, neighbourhoods, communities, regions and markets with limited research into the value of social capital in organisations. Intellectual capital models tend to have an incomplete and biased view of assets within the firm.

This week we will have a discussion on social capital and leadership facilitated by Marion Cornish and Beverly Sloan. Social capital is currently a hot topic in leadership literature and a potentially useful framework for understanding leadership. This session will explore the linkages between social capital and two commonly accepted models of leadership: Authentic Leadership and Servant Leadership. The session will start with short presentations by Marion Cornish and Beverly Sloan followed by a discussion focused on leadership analysis based on social capital emergence and how this relates to the current leadership literature.

Social capital theory aims to capture aspects of the ‘social’ that contribute economic value. It thus stands at the intersection of disciplines, fields and forms of life. This presentation places social capital theory in the context of attempts within mainstream economics to understand and capture the ‘social’ and more recent efforts by social scientists to gain recognition for the ‘social’ within mainstream policy debates.

There are several nagging tensions and incongruences associated with the concept of social capital that are typically ignored but are impossible to escape and, it seems, to resolve. Critics are quick to point to these problems but the growing body of literature on social capital seems immune to criticism. Is it useful to frame these issues as “wicked problems”?

This week we will have a discussion session about the “wicked problems” of social capital conceptualisations. This follows from our previous session where Tristan Claridge gave a presentation on this topic. There are a lot of issues to explore from this presentation – we did not have time in the previous session to answer all questions so this session will be an opportunity to have discussion about these issues and explore them more deeply.