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A Few Minutes with Jeff Koeze: Social Capital, Community, and Universities
May 01, 2025
The Business Ethics Center at Seidman became the Koeze Business Ethics Initiative (KBEI) in 2015, after a generous gift from the Koeze family (owners of the Koeze Company, a 110-year-old family business in Grand Rapids) made it possible for us to expand our capabilities and offerings.
Jeff Koeze, who has run Koeze Co. for close to 20 years, has a particular interest in social capital and the ways in which social capital has defined, benefited, and sustained Grand Rapids over the course of its history.
Social capital has a variety of meanings, but there is some consensus that it is about the value of social networks (formal but even more so informal), bonding similar people and bridging between diverse people, with norms of reciprocity. Members of a community with strong social capital tend to have more opportunities, be healthier and wealthier, and build and maintain civic institutions that are trustworthy.
Koeze sees the university (generically, but in this case specifically GVSU) as playing a central role in building social capital by exercising its convening power, its ability as a “neutral institution” to bring members of various communities together to hold and expand conversations critical to the success of that community. Koeze was a tenured professor of public health law at the University of North Carolina before coming back to GR to take the reins of the company, and while he appreciates research as much as the next academic, he thinks regional universities such as ours miss an essential element of their role if they overlook their responsibility to be of service to the local institutions that also figure in the social capital equation: local government, businesses, health care systems, K-12 schools, and so on. “When the KBEI – and Seidman – ask themselves what they can do to help ensure that the remarkable social capital that Grand Rapids enjoys endures and expands, then they are part of the virtuous circle that makes this place attractive; when that is ignored it has a negative impact community-wide.”
Besides its “convening power,” Jeff also supports the KBEI in the hope that we can “model for students how to find stuff out for themselves.” A former English major, he argues that “managing primary material rather than secondary, pre-digested rework is critical to learning how to think through real problems.
Ideally, an education in the humanities and in business would be interwoven, if for no other reason than its singular ability to give students the capacity to distinguish between bad arguments and good ones, bad data and good data, and humane solutions and demoralizing ones.”
~ interviewed by KBEI director Michael DeWilde