title: The Role of Sister Cities' Staff Exchanges in Developing "Learning Cities": Exploring Necessary and Sufficient Conditions in Social Capital Development Utilizing Proportional Odds Modeling.
abstract: In the last half century former international adversaries have become cooperators through networking and knowledge sharing for decision making aimed at improving quality of life and sustainability; nowhere has this been more striking then at the urban level where such activity is seen as a key component in building "learning cities" through the development of social capital. Although mega-cities have been leaders in such efforts, mid-sized cities with lesser resource endowments have striven to follow by focusing on more frugal sister city type exchanges. The underlying thesis of our research is that great value can be derived from city-to-city exchanges through social capital development. However, such a study must differentiate between necessary and sufficient conditions. Past studies assumed necessary conditions were met and immediately jumped to demonstrating the existence of structural relationships by measuring networking while further assuming that the existence of such demonstrated a parallel development of cognitive social capital. Our research addresses this lacuna by stepping back and critically examining these assumptions. To accomplish this goal we use a Proportional Odds Modeling with a Cumulative Logit Link approach to demonstrate the existence of a common latent structure, hence asserting that necessary conditions are met.
authors.affiliation: Huxley Environmental College, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA. patrick.buckley@wwu.edu.
authors.forename: Patrick Henry
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Buckley
authors.affiliation: School of Commerce, Meiji University, Tokyo 101-8301, Japan. takahasi@meiji.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Akio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Takahashi
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA. amy.anderson@wwu.edu.
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Anderson
mesh_terms: D002947:Cities; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D006801:Humans; D007391:International Cooperation; D007564:Japan; D007858:Learning; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015397:Program Evaluation; D011788:Quality of Life; D066270:Social Capital; D012922:Social Change; D014481:United States
keywords: Japan; learning cities; proportional odds modeling; quality of life; sister cities; social capital; sustainability