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