A Logical Experiment?
A Logical Experiment?
Thesis
In their article, Costa and Kahn explore the possible incentives that American men had to join the army during the civil war when pay was low and death or injury was certain. They determined that the Union army promoted social capital and group loyalty that not only attracted men to join in the Civil War but also encouraged them to reenlist once their term was over.
Evidence
The paper spends a great deal of time noting that while every organization faces issues that can be mitigated, soldiers who fought in the Civil War faced a number of critical problems and saw little to no mitigation of these problems. Many soldiers would die on the job, and the ones who survived were likely to be discharged and were lucky if their pay check showed up on time. They also argue that the soldier’s survival instinct is to avoid service or putting themselves in harms’ way, and in fact, they argue that this is the rational choice. However, when social capital is involved, and those men care about the fate of others, they become sustained not by money but by courage, peer pressure, duty, ideology, patriotism, and self-respect.
Yet, the authors note that is no real way to measure social capital. Thus, to prove their thesis, Costa and Khan use individual characteristics and community characteristics, and then combined it with empirical data from 31,854 white men who were enlisted across 303 infantry companies in the Union Army. They used the data regarding arrests, desertion, AWOL status, and promotions to measure cowardice and heroism, and they applied it to a competing risk hazard model to determine how many days it took from joining the company until one of these actions happened.
The results of the equation showed that there were identifiable individual and community characteristics that served as active indicators of heroism or cowardice, or in this case, social capital. For example, married men were more likely to desert while farmers were less likely to desert. Also, men from British and Irish families were twice as likely to desert as men who were born in the United States.
Conclusion
The primary issue with this study remains the fact that there is no way to accurately measure social capital, and rather than testing empirical data, the researchers tested corresponding themes as a proxy for social capital. According to van Deth, they cannot expect that a proxy would meet the exact specifications of the concept of social capital itself. Essentially, Costa and Khan admitted that they cannot measure social capital, used empirical data in its place, and then tried to reapply it to social capital, which is “theoretically naïve.”
The data presented by Costa and Khan could be convincing for organizations on its own, but by placing it in the framework of social capital, they removed it from a straightforward and logical research strategy. Thus, it might change the outlook on social capital in the military or other high-risk organizations, but it does not provide motivation for action.
Bibliography
Costa, Dora, and Matthew Kahn. "Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War." NBER Working Paper Series (2001): 1-34.
Van Deth, Jan. 2003. "Measuring social captial: Orthodoxies and continuing controversies." International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 6, no. 1 (2003): 79-92. doi:10.1080/13645570305057.
