Is Your Social Graph “Local” or “Cosmopolitan?”

Every time I hear ref­er­ences to social graphs, I’m reminded about research into rela­tion­ships and com­mu­nity struc­tures, pub­lished by Harvard’s Ros­a­beth Moss Kan­ter in a thought-provoking book, World Class: Thriv­ing Locally in a Global Econ­omy (1995). Kanter’s research sug­gested that peo­ple, orga­ni­za­tions and civic com­mu­ni­ties grav­i­tate toward one of two classes: local or cosmopolitan.

Mind­sets, com­pe­ten­cies and con­nec­tions are what dis­tin­guish these two social classes.

The impli­ca­tions can be pro­found for local economies, based on the preva­lence and mind­sets of locals ver­sus cos­mopoli­tans within their pop­u­la­tion. At its worst the polit­i­cal divides can be polar­iz­ing, espe­cially in regions full of locals whose once thriv­ing indus­try has with­ered away or moved off­shore. Unable or resis­tant to change, locals can lan­guish in a com­mu­nity of “have nots” who lack the imag­i­na­tion and where­withal to rein­vent their local economy.

These dis­tinc­tions apply to the world as a whole, not just the Amer­i­cans Kan­ter stud­ied for World Class. As she declared so pre­sciently 15 years ago,

Today, the world econ­omy is a period of rapid and dra­matic change, and the ques­tion of just how we will con­nect to this new world is the sin­gle most impor­tant issue of our lifetime.

Here is how she char­ac­ter­izes these two social classes.

Cos­mopoli­tans

Cos­mopoli­tans enjoy travel, “are com­fort­able in many places,” and tend to move away from the homes of their youth for access to a wider set of oppor­tu­ni­ties. They are broad-minded, have learned to be adapt­able, to lis­ten, and how to bridge cul­tures. By def­i­n­i­tion they are well-connected to other peo­ple and infor­ma­tion resources. Kan­ter writes:

Cos­mopoli­tans are rich in three intan­gi­ble assets, three C’s that trans­late into pre­em­i­nence and power in a global econ­omy: con­cepts — the best and lat­est knowl­edge and ideas; com­pe­tence — the abil­ity to oper­ate at the high­est stan­dards of any place any­where; and con­nec­tions — the best rela­tion­ships, which pro­vide access to the resources of other peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions around the world.

Cos­mopoli­tans tend to affil­i­ate with other like-minded cos­mopoli­tans. Depend­ing on how often they travel and how many places they’ve lived in, their ties to their local com­mu­nity may be loose, and their def­i­n­i­tion of “home” quite fluid or multi-faceted.

Locals

Kan­ter goes on to say,

Locals, by con­trast, are defined pri­mar­ily by par­tic­u­lar places. Some are rooted in their com­mu­ni­ties but remain open to global think­ing and oppor­tu­ni­ties. Oth­ers are sim­ply stuck.

As long as their local econ­omy remains vibrant, locals like these enjoy sat­is­fy­ing lives sur­rounded by friends and fam­ily, nour­ished by long-term ties, deeply rooted in their com­mu­nity. When all goes well, they pro­vide the social cap­i­tal and invest­ments of time and resources that enable their local clubs, churches, syn­a­gogues and schools to thrive.

Unfor­tu­nately, locals tend to be vul­ner­a­ble, says Kan­ter, to exter­nal changes imposed by fac­tors beyond their con­trol, such as fac­tory clo­sures, the exhaus­tion of local nat­ural resources, as in Oregon’s tim­ber indus­try, or the mid-century migra­tion of the tex­tile indus­try away from New Eng­land to the South­east and now to Asia. Locals can suf­fer when exoge­nous change occurs:

…At the extreme end of the local class are those whose skills are not par­tic­u­larly unique or desir­able, whose con­nec­tions are lim­ited to a small cir­cle in the neigh­bor­hood, and whose oppor­tu­ni­ties are con­fined to their own com­mu­ni­ties. In con­trast with the lim­it­less hori­zons for cos­mopoli­tans, [such locals] face increas­ing lim­its to oppor­tu­nity. They lack con­trol over resources and knowl­edge, which can move rapidly in and out of their communities.

Given the cul­tural divide between “Red States” and “Blue States,” I won­der how much of it might be ascribed to the pre­dom­i­nance of cos­mopoli­tans ver­sus locals within their boundaries…

Visu­al­iz­ing These Differences

It would be inter­est­ing to apply these con­structs to the lead­ing social net­works and other online com­mu­ni­ties, to see what the pat­terns might reveal. It’s prob­a­bly a safe bet that LinkedIn enjoys lots of cos­mopoli­tans within its pro­fes­sional mem­ber­ship. As MySpace moves down mar­ket, is its appeal shift­ing towards locals? And is Face­Book a mix of the two? An inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of US regions based on Face­Book data by Pete War­den is an intrigu­ing begin­ning (as shown here).

It’s beyond my abil­i­ties to apply data min­ing or visu­al­iza­tion to their mem­bers’ con­nec­tions and degrees of rela­tion­ship in order to com­pare social net­works. But it will be fas­ci­nat­ing to dis­cover the pat­terns that char­ac­ter­ize com­mu­ni­ties based on their mem­bers’ mind­sets, geo­graphic locale, and inter­con­nec­tions. I look for­ward to what will emerge from the social sci­en­tists who will study this subject.

Hav­ing said that, the unin­tended con­se­quences of doing so might be fright­en­ing, espe­cially if unscrupu­lous politi­cians and dem­a­gogues exploit the results to fur­ther polar­ize the cit­i­zenry of our already divided country.

News update: Pete War­den, the cre­ator of the social graph above, has had to destroy the data set he culled (appar­ently with­out per­mis­sion) from Face­Book in the face of threat­ened legal action, say­ing he could not afford the lit­i­ga­tion costs.

Clearly, this is a con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject on many levels…

Tagged as: community structures, local versus cosmopolitan, social graph, social networking

Revised on June 4, 2010