京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第18968号 / 工博第4010号 / 新制||工||1618(附属図書館) / 31919 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科都市社会工学専攻 / (主査)教授 小林 潔司, 教授 川﨑 雅史, 准教授 松島 格也 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

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Credit cooperatives make a significant economic and social contribution to development in Kenya. They are unique financial institutions that are jointly owned and democratically controlled by their members. This study explores how members of Kenyan credit cooperatives achieve economic cooperation. A sociological basis of cooperation exists because cooperatives are voluntary associations. Economic cooperation was thus conceptualised as collective economic action that enables individual actors to secure economic benefits through associational membership. An economic sociology perspective provided the theoretical basis for combining the analysis of economic interests and social relations. The study employed a qualitative case study research design involving a rural and an urban credit cooperative. Social capital was used to explore the role of associational features in facilitating collective action while the concept of institutions was used to examine how institutions organize and shape collective action. Each cooperative was conceptualised as a microstructure to enable an analysis of group relations. An analysis of the economic and socio-political context provided the contextual basis for economic cooperation. The findings suggest that shared values and solidarity bonds are important in creating collective economic resources while maintenance of the collective resources depends on regular reciprocity exchanges, effective enforcement and transparent representation. A new regulatory framework that emphasizes prudential standards and economic efficiency has redefined the incentive structure for Kenyan credit cooperatives. It is likely to favour a business rather than a social welfare mentality in the cooperatives. The socio-political context reveals persistent vertical linkages that have resulted in low political and economic power for rural smallholder farmers compared to urban public sector employees. The study concludes that although credit cooperatives have acted as financial catalysts by enabling the participation of disadvantaged groups in the economic sphere, they are also societal mirrors that reflect the broader income and gender inequalities existing in society. The recognition of cooperatives as economic and social organizations therefore contributes to a better understanding of how cooperatives work.

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The integration of immigrants has been a significant area of research, focusing on aspects such as employment, housing, and education for newly arrived community members. In recent years, scholarly attention has increasingly turned toward social networks and their influence on immigrant integration into the labor market of the host country. This study aims to examine the role of social networks in relation to labor market integration by conducting an in-depth analysis of two distinct groups of second-generation immigrants in Sweden, originating from Bosnia and Somalia. Additionally, the study explores the impact of social identities, including social class, education, culture, and gender, on their integration and the formation of social ties. Through a case study of Växjö, this research offers an opportunity to explore the long-term effects of networks by comparing the similarities and differences in the patterns of integration among second-generation immigrants from Bosnia and Somalia. The qualitative case study employs semi-structured interviews supplemented by a desk analysis of existing research and published works. By synthesizing social network and social capital theories, the analysis sheds light on the significance of strong and weak ties for skilled and less skilled immigrants in finding employment and achieving labor market integration. Based on 18 interviews, the findings highlight contrasting patterns between the Bosnian and Somali immigrant groups. Because of the Bosnians' higher education levels and middle-class backgrounds, they predominantly rely on weak ties to secure employment. Conversely, most Somalis heavily depend on strong relationships due to cultural considerations, lower levels of education, and social class. Moreover, while Bosnian networks exhibit gender equality in educational attainment and access to job opportunities, Somali networks still face challenges regarding gender disparities in labor market access. This comparative study contributes to peace and development research by generating new knowledge and understanding of the role of social networks in the economic integration of immigrant groups from diverse backgrounds and cultures. The findings underscore the importance of considering the interplay between social ties, social identities, and employment.

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Social capital is the value of the relationships we create and maintain within our social networks to gain access to and mobilize needed resources (e.g., jobs, moral support). Quantifying, and subsequently leveraging, social capital are challenging problems in the social sciences. Most work so far has focused on analyses from static surveys of limited numbers of participants. The explosion of online social media means that it is now possible to collect rich data about people's connections and interactions, in a completely ubiquitous, non-intrusive manner. Such dynamic social data opens the door to the more accurate measuring and tracking of social capital. Similarly, online data is replete with additional personal data, such as topics discussed in blogs or hobbies listed in personal profiles, that is difficult to obtain through standard surveys. Such information can be used to discover similarities, or implicit affinities, among individuals, which in turn leads to finer measures of social capital, including the often useful distinction between bonding and bridging social capital. In this work, we exploit these opportunities and propose a computational framework for quantifying and leveraging social capital in online communities. In addition to being dynamic and formalizing the notion of implicit affinities, our framework significantly extends current social network analysis research by modeling access and mobilization of resources, the essence of social capital. The main contributions of our framework include 1) hybrid networks that provide a way for potential and realized social capital to be distinguished; 2) the decoupling of bonding and bridging social capital, a formulation previously overlooked which coincides with empirical evidence; 3) the unification of multiple views on social capital, in particular, the seamless integration of resources. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework through a number of representative, real-world case studies to test relevant social science hypotheses. Assuming that the extraction of implicit affinities may be useful for community building, we built a large social network of blogs from an active, tech-oriented segment of the Blogosphere, using cross-references among blogs. We then used topic modeling techniques to extract an implicit affinity network based on the content of the blogs, and showed that potential sub-communities could be formed through increased bonding. A widespread assumption in sociology is that bonding is more likely than bridging in social networks. In other words, people are more likely to seek out others who are like them than attempt to link to those they share little or nothing with. We wanted to test that hypothesis, particularly in the context of online communities. Using Twitter, we created an experiment where hand-crafted accounts would tweet at regular intervals and use varied following strategies, including following only those with maximum affinity, following only those with no affinity, following random users, etc. Using the number of follow-backs as a surrogate for social capital, we showed that the assumed physical social behavior is also prevalent online, p < 0.01. There is much interest in computational social science to compare physical and cyber behaviors, test existing hypotheses on a large scale and design novel experiments. The advent of social media is also impacting public health, with growing evidence that some global health issues (e.g., H1N1 outbreak) may be discovered and tracked more efficiently by monitoring the content of social exchanges (e.g., blogs, tweets). In collaboration with colleagues from Health Sciences, we wanted to test whether broadly applicable health topics were discussed on Twitter, and to design and guide the process of discovering such themes. We gathered a large number of tweets over several regions of the United States over a one-month period, and analyzed their content using topic modeling techniques. We found that while clearly not a mainstream topic, health concerns were non-negligible on Twitter. By further focusing on tobacco, we discovered several subtopics related to tobacco (e.g., tobacco use promotion, addiction recovery), which indicate that analysis of the Twitter social network may help researchers better understand how Twitter promotes both positive and negative health behaviors. Finally, in collaboration with colleagues from Linguistics, we wanted to quantify the effect of social capital on second language acquisition in study abroad. Using questionnaire data collected from about 200 study abroad participants, we found that students participating in bridging relationships had significantly higher levels of language improvement than their counterparts, F(1,201) = 12.53, p < .0001.

With Internet access and use becoming nearly ubiquitous aspects of an individual’s experience of everyday life, sociologists must consider how the Internet is transforming an individual's experience of community. This study examines the connections between place-independent forms of social capital actuated online, place-dependent forms of social capital actuated face-to-face, and individuals' perceptions of community attachment and community satisfaction. Moving from a theoretical foundation to empirical evidence, I show the concepts of bonding and bridging social capital can and should be divided based upon the medium through which they are actuated. I then explore the effect of online and offline forms of bonding and bridging social capital on individuals' perceptions of community attachment and community satisfaction. Based on data from 52 communities in Montana, collected in 2012, the results indicate that a significant distinction exists between online and offline social capital and that online social capital is capable, to a limited degree, of ameliorating some of the consequences of geographic isolation, or distance, experienced by many residents of rural communities. The results also indicate that while online actuations of social capital are statistically and substantively important in explaining individuals' perceptions of community, offline actuations of social capital are associated with larger substantive impacts on individuals' perceptions of community attachment and community satisfaction, suggesting that while online social capital is an important part of how individuals experience community, face-to-face, or offline actuations of social capital are more important in determining how individuals perceive the geographically fixed communities in which they reside.