As a social scientist carrying out research in the broad field of
the Digital Economy, I’m always looking for the interesting social angles in
the areas that we explore. My research is ultimately about the impact that
broadband (or its applications) can have on rural businesses – so on the
surface it looks more to the economy than the dynamics of social life in the
countryside. But as soon as you start talking to people about these issues,
you’re immediately reminded of the bigger picture. As individuals, we don’t
fully segregate the different aspects of our lives. We define ourselves loosely
(and fluidly) around a set of identities along with other attributes -
particularly those relating to our personalities, interests and values.
When we
start our working day we perhaps enter more into one identity than another – we
put on the right hat for the job. But the activities that take us through that
working day invariably call on other aspects of self too. For example
personality, values or mood might influence how we respond to a blunt email,
and our interests have a bearing on the value we find in opportunities in the
business or work place. So when I started to speak to rural businesses about
their networking behaviours, my understanding of what it means to live and work
rurally started to grow. I discovered that networking wasn’t just something
that people did to drive sales and grow their businesses. Networking is
embedded into the social and cultural aspects of life, whether rural or not.
Yet rural businesses in particular seem to value business networking not just
for its professional benefits but also for the social interaction that comes
with it.
Perhaps this is because many of the people I spoke to are entrepreneurs,
often working from home with few or no employees. The social elements of a
traditional workplace are often not appreciated until they are gone – something
I learned myself on having my first baby, spending most of my days at home with
a small person and no adult conversation. Even for those in an active rural
community, life in the countryside can be isolating. Many of the people I
visited live very remotely with large distances even to the nearest village. Working
all day on your own can lead to loneliness, meaning that contact with others
takes on an added significance, even when that contact is, strictly speaking,
work related. This isolation can also mean that people feel that they are not
keeping up to speed with developments in their sector. Networking (both
formally and informally) helps to give rural entrepreneurs a sense of what is
going on in their wider professional field.
Some of the business people I spoke to had made a lifestyle choice –
starting a business from home would allow them to work flexibly around other
important aspects of life such as young family. But this ultimately affected
other social areas. This perhaps explains the greater importance of networking
for such individuals.
The interviews that I carried out on networking are the first part
of a project which seeks to understand the networking needs of rural businesses
with the aim of designing a networking site that is truly useful for those
businesses. I learned a lot about how rural businesses are already using social
networking sites to expand their networks, gain support and seek out business
opportunities. Not all of the businesses had taken this path. Some shunned
social networking, unable to make the connection between what they saw as
mindless babble on Facebook with business opportunities in the real world.
Others understood the distinction between personal pages and business pages – although
some observed that certain business pages seemed to crossover too freely into
“I’ve just had a nice cup of tea” territory – highlighting the important and
perhaps tricky task of managing one’s professional identity online. Yet at the
same time, a degree of warmth and personality is valued. Overall, for those
engaging with social media, Twitter emerged as the favourite place for
professional networking and Facebook as the medium through which to reach out
to potential clients. LinkedIn was often described as something people were
doing but without any obvious benefits – it just felt like a growing list of
names to some.
I could talk at length about the findings around networking and the
ways in which rural businesses network and collaborate to add value to their
business activities. I will be sharing those findings in forthcoming academic
publications. But this post is more about the other insights – the ways in
which the social is embedded in business practises. The literature on business
networking acknowledges the importance of social factors. A “business” network
is typically constructed not just of business contacts, but also of family
members and people from the local community whose connection with the business
is not immediately obvious. These connections (which the literature would call
“strong ties”) provide a backbone which supports rural businesses in numerous ways
– anything from creating a culture of loyalty towards that business within a
particular community, to the sharing of resources to solve problems. There
seems to be a sense of reciprocity in rural communities – a belief that doing
good turns for others will result in benefits to oneself – if not today or the
next day, then perhaps in 6 months or a year. Whether these benefits relate to
the business or other aspects of life is immaterial. This is what the literature might refer to as
social capital. Even rural businesses which we would expect to be in
competition often support one another. This expands the concept of rural
community from notions of place to those of interest and mutual benefit. Rural
business people are shrewd in recognising opportunities for the growth of their
business, but they also respond to others who share their values or ideas and
look for ways to work with them. Many
told me that although online networking tools might help them identify
potential people to work with, they would have to meet these people in person
to establish whether a rapport existed between them – something they felt could
not be achieved through the web. It will be interesting to explore how these
perceptions might change as the project progresses and their experience of
online networking grows. The main lesson for me though was to acknowledge that
social and cultural life is not distinct from business practises but rather
these things coexist naturally. Perhaps for some the trick is to differentiate
these effectively in order to achieve a successful work-life balance. But for
those living and working rurally, the benefits might lie not in
compartmentalizing the social from the professional but rather in their
integration.
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