Elsevier

Social Networks

Volume 56, January 2019, Pages 10-22
Social Networks

External exposure, boundary-spanning, and opinion leadership in remote communities: A network experiment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2018.08.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • conducted interventions on 16 social networks in Sumatran villages and analysed the outcomes with ERGMs.

  • individuals’ exposure to the external world is associated with opinion leadership in remote communities.

  • boundary-spanners are opinion leaders.

Abstract

Are boundary spanners opinion leaders in ethnically segregated remote low-income communities or are they shunned? Can external exposure create opinion leaders in such peripheral communities? To answer these questions, we invited randomly selected farmers from 16 randomly selected communities in Sumatra to three-day networking and training events outside of their villages. The substantive purpose of these events was for the farmers to learn new practices from their peers in the visited locations. Eighteen months later, we conducted a sociocentric survey of information-sharing networks in the 16 communities. These 16 networks included 380 members, of which 117 participated in our randomized intervention and 263 were in the control group. We found that participants of our randomized intervention had an average indegree that was double that of the control group (2.8 vs 1.4). We applied Exponential Random Graph Models to the 16 networks to account for endogenous network tendencies. We treated participation in the intervention and the number of boundary-spanning links of each actor as node covariates. Results from our models show that actors who participated in the intervention had higher levels of influence in their communities than the control group, and actors with more boundary spanning links were more popular sources of advice. The results suggest that network interventions do not always need to rely on opinion leaders. Under certain conditions, interventions can create opinion leaders by changing local social networks. We conclude with methodological implications for using interventions in social network research.

Introduction

Social networks are important channels for learning, innovation, and information diffusion in isolated agrarian communities (Isaac et al., 2014, 2007; Bodin and Prell, 2011). For the inhabitants of such communities, direct exposure to the external world can be an eye-opening experience. Meeting people outside of their village can open access to knowledge that is unavailable at home (Matouš and Todo, 2018). However, traditional village dwellers might not always see the value of such exposure, and information coming from external sources might not be widely accepted, particularly in societies characterised by high levels of territorialism or ethnic fragmentation (Barnes et al., 2016).

This study is about boundary spanning and opinion leadership in remote communities. Boundary spanning and opinion leadership are distinct but potentially intertwined concepts. Boundary spanners communicate across the boundaries of their groups (Shah et al., 2018). Opinion leaders are popular individuals whom others seek for information and whose practices are likely to be imitated (Valente and Davis, 1999; Parau et al., 2017).

In peripheral communities, new ideas and practices often come from outside and are adopted first by those on the margin of the local networks whose attention is directed outwards (Valente, 1995). New practices diffuse widely in the local communities only if opinion leaders accept them and opinion leaders will be careful to do that. If external influences are generally frowned upon, opinion leaders may be reluctant to engage with the external world and adopt practices coming from outside. In contrast, if boundary spanning brings respect and prestige, the people whose links cross the network boundary will be in the centre of community attention, and the diffusion of external innovations will become faster (Rogers, 2003).

Understanding these mechanisms and the ways to manipulate them is useful for disseminating information in isolated settlements, promoting good practices, and designing network interventions that could effectively improve people’s lives in marginalized communities. Numerous studies have been conducted on personal attributes of opinion leaders (Rogers, 2003) but we still do not sufficiently understand the network mechanisms of how external social influences affect opinion leadership in remote agrarian communities. Only a very small number of sociocentric studies have been conducted in rural regions of developing countries, where social learning via informal networks is the dominant mechanism of information dissemination (Shakya et al., 2017; Perkins et al., 2015). The overwhelming majority of empirical evidence on boundary spanning in social networks stems from corporate and organizational settings (Barnes et al., 2016), and almost all research on the relationships between brokerage, prestige, and trust, comes from networks of North Americans and Europeans (Burt and Burzynska, 2017). Moreover, it is very rare for network studies to deliberately manipulate the studied networks (Valente, 2017), which further limits the degree to which we can truly understand the network mechanisms of interest (Groce et al., 2018).

The aim of this research is to identify how boundary-spanning and opinion leadership interacts in remote communities in Sumatra. To understand the involved network mechanisms, we designed an experiment in which we manipulated the local farmers’ information-sharing networks by exposing randomly selected individuals to social learning opportunities outside of their communities. Using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs), we assessed how (1) boundary-spanning links and (2) short-term external social exposure relates to actors’ network centralities within their communities over a period of 18 months.

Section snippets

Boundary spanning

The importance of boundary spanners for connecting diverse knowledge pools and communities of practice has been recognised in the literature (Reagans and McEvily, 2003; van Meerkerk and Edelenbos, 2014). Whereas dense relations inside groups and network closure facilitate coordination, collaboration, and trust (Frank et al., 2011; Coleman, 1990, 1988; Greif, 1989; Uzzi, 1997), boundary-spanners can play a crucial role in the transmission of new information between communities (Matous, 2015;

Methods

In this section, after introducing the context of the studied networks, we describe the strategy to clarify whether and how short term external exposure of some community members can change the internal network structures of their communities.

Direct comparisons

First, we compare personal and household attributes of the treatment group members and the control group members. We examine variables that could not be influenced by the intervention (i.e. age and years of formal education) to test whether the randomization was executed correctly and the farmers who participated in the intervention are indeed on average similar in terms of their observable characteristics to the control group.

We find no significant difference between the education and assets

Substantive implications

Practical impact-oriented network scholars have been asking how to facilitate social tie formation so that targeted networks develop desirable structural properties (Bodin, 2017). Previous research has suggested that it is relatively easy to manipulate interpersonal information-sharing networks, as opposed to achieving a meaningful change in, for example, friendship networks (Valente, 2017) or multi-stakeholder decision networks (Dougill et al., 2006). The results of this experiment suggest

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ayu Pratiwi and Yasuyuki Todo for their crucial contributions in organizing this study.

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