Entrepreneurial Social Infrastructure: A Necessary Ingredient

Abstract

Local communities are faced with increasing responsibilities to provide for their own well-being and development. With fewer resources, communities need more successful ways of uniting people and resources. Entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) is a necessary ingredient for successfully linking physical resources and leadership for community development. ESI includes three elements: symbolic diversity, resource mobilization, and quality of networks. Instead of fostering perverse conflict or superficial harmony, symbolic diversity inspires communities to engage in constructive controversy to arrive at workable community decisions by focusing on community processes, depersonalization of politics, and broadening of community boundaries. Resource mobilization involves generating some surplus within the community beyond basic subsistence with relative equity in resource and risk distribution, investment by residents of their own private capital locally, and collective investment in the community (willingness of residents to tax themselves). Quality networks include establishing linkages with others in similar circumstances and developing vertical networks to provide diverse sources—both within and outside the community—of experience and knowledge.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

1. Ronald J. Hustedde , “Developing Leadership to Address Rural Problems,” in Rural Community Economic Development, ed. Norman Waltzer (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 111-123.

2. Swanson conceptualizes social infrastructure as having three parts: (1) social institutions, including local government, social service institutions, voluntary and civic organizations, and the like; (2) human resources, which include attributes of inhabitants such as their technical expertise, organizational skills, educational levels, and even social structure—class, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on; and (3) characteristics of social networks, including innovativeness, ability to mobilize resources within the community, ability to link up with outside expertise and information, and so on. Louis Swanson , “Rural Social Infrastructure,” in Foundations of Rural Development Policy, ed. J. Norman Reid et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). We have defined social infrastructure more narrowly, limiting it to specifically collective or explicitly interactive elements. Since human resources, or what the economists call human capital, are properties of individuals—although a product of collective human endeavor—we have omitted them from our definition, which includes group-level or collective aspects of social institutions, such as communities or organizations.

3. William R. Freudenburg , “The Density of Acquaintanceship: An Overlooked Variable in Community Research?” American Journal of Sociology, 92:27-63 (July 1986).

4. Role homogeneity and high density of acquaintanceship can also exist in ethnic or minority neighborhoods in urban areas. Rural communities that are undergoing rapid growth or that serve as bedroom communities for larger urban centers may not have those characteristics.

5. Jan L. Flora et al. , From the Grassroots: Case Studies of Rural Self Development Efforts, Agriculture and Rural Economy Division Staff Report (Washington, DC: Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, forthcoming).