Connections in the Workplace as a Way of Accumulating Social Capital by Polish Immigrants in the USA

Summary

Social capital is, broadly speaking, all social relations that have productive benefits. These social relations appear in political, religious, and social participation, social trust, honesty, reciprocity, philanthropy, and group activities (such as volunteering) or, obviously, between people in the workplace. In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam suggests that people's lives revolve around work a lot these days, and people not only transfer their social lives to their workplace but also accumulate their social capital there. The questions discussed in this paper are the following: do Polish immigrants maintain contacts in an American workplace? Of what kind? What benefits, if any, do they gain from them? Do they bond or bridge, and with whom? The research conducted was qualitative. Polish immigrants who have lived in the USA for more than five years were contacted via e-mail and asked open questions about the nature of their social capital accumulated in their workplace, as well as about the benefits stemming from it. The results reveal that these connections are not limited to a workplace but spread into other spheres of immigrants’ lives.

American society is a composition of immigrants among which immigrants from Poland have constituted a substantial group. The first Poles came to the USA as early as the 18^th century; by the end of the 20^th century Poles constituted a group of 466,740 people (Census 2000). They immigrated to America for many reasons, but the leading ones have always been economic and political.