Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807848247 ISBN 13: 9780807848241

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999

The decade of the 1980s marked a triumph for market capitalism. As politicians of all stripes sought to reinvent government in the image of private enterprise, they looked to the voluntary sector for allies to assuage the human costs of reductions in public policies of social welfare. This book details the "savage side" of market capitalism in Appalachia and explains the social, political, and economic roles that mediating structures play in mitigating it. Profiling the work of twenty-three such mediating structures--community-based organizations that battled to provide social safety nets, fight environmental assaults, and upgrade the education and job skills of Appalachian residents--Richard Couto distills the practical lessons to be found in their successes and shortcomings.

Couto argues that a broader set of democratic dimensions be used in taking the measure of civil society and public policy in the twenty-first century. He shows that mediating structures promote the democratic prospect of reduced inequality and increased communal bonds when they provide and advocate for new forms and increased amounts of social capital--the public goods and moral resources that we invest in one another as members of a community.

Book Description:

"Offers an excellent review of the social capital literature. . . . Because the research design of this project can be adapted to many other studies focused on social capital, the book will be especially useful for social scientists and management specialists in various disciplines interested in social capital research."-- Choice

From the Inside Flap:

Examines the theoretical relationship between community-based organizations that link individuals and government and assesses how this relationship has played out in American public policy on education and health care.