Bridging Social Divides in India and Beyond

Abstract

Our societies are increasingly being polarized across divides of politics, values, identities and interests. Polarization is a serious societal challenge, involving problems such as conflicts, exclusion, marginalization, targeted violence, and extremism. The social divides generated by polarization may potentially undermine modern institutions and stall socioeconomic progress in many countries across the world.

The social systems, organizations, and technologies that shape social life in current times may also contribute to generating and exacerbating such social divides. These enable people to remain in their own preferred worlds by more easily surrounding themselves with others who share similar views, and by limiting interactions with less similar others. While such gatherings around similarities can bring together people to work on collective goals at a large scale more easily than before, they also facilitate putting people into tight echo chambers of shared ideology, interests, and beliefs. In workplaces, social inclusion can be severely affected by drift of people into such polarized echo chambers. Such polarization raises troubling questions for multicultural societies. As a society with very high level of diversity in terms of languages, castes, religions, and ethnicities, Indian society has often been challenged by polarization of various kinds. Increasingly, polarization has become a global phenomenon and has exacerbated in both physical and virtual forms, leading to problems like ghettoization and cyber-balkanization.

A societal challenge of this complex nature and large scale requires the development of systematic knowledge, with a view to facilitate deeper understanding of associated problems and to develop potential solutions. In particular, systematic knowledge about social bridging efforts is particularly limited, and yet is much needed in current times by multiple societal stakeholders. Furthermore, knowledge of social bridging may exist in bits and pieces in multiple disciplines and sub-disciplines, and is in need of integration.

We seek to better understand how social bridging takes place in such contexts of polarization. Such research could focus on the people, organizations, or other organizing efforts involved in bridging social divides, including the skillsets, capabilities, practices and tools used (e.g., language, symbolic actions, substantive actions) to organize such initiatives. Developing a systematic understanding of such bridging initiatives is important and would be valuable for developing interventions to reduce unhealthy social divides that manifest in organizations, communities and society at large. The knowledge will provide insights to citizens, organizational leaders and policy makers to develop and improve initiatives for addressing the challenges of increased polarization in societies. Show more