Social Networks & Social Capital in ICT Use: Study of Manchester Communities by Kathleen Hardin Williams, University of Michigan 2005

Social networks, social capital, and the use of information and communications technology in socially excluded communities: a study of community groups in Manchester, England by Kathleen Hardin Williams A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Information) in the University of Michigan 2005 Doctoral Committee: Professor Joan C. Durrance, Chair Professor Daniel E. Atkins III Professor John L. King Associate Professor Larry M.

Gant i Dedication To my mother, Patricia Perlitz Williams, who taught me order To my father, Dave Harrell Williams, who showed me I could go my own way To my closest colleague and dearest love, Abdul Alkalimat (Gerald A. McWorter), whose help mattered so much ii Acknowledgements Deepest thanks to all those who have taught and helped and encouraged me: my professors, especially Joan Durrance, Dan Atkins, Larry Gant, and John King; my Mancunian colleagues, especially Dave Carter, Gary Copitch, and Bernard Leach; the hardworking staff of the University of Michigan School of Information; the W. Kellogg Foundation, which through the Alliance for Community Technology provided support for the duration of my doctoral work; the Manchester Digital Development Agency and the University of Michigan Non-Profit and Public Management Center, which provided funding for dissertation research expenses; the University of Manchester’s Ahmed Iqbal Race Relations Resource Center, which afforded me a local base of operations; my fellow doctoral students at Michigan and elsewhere; my students at the Devry Institute, the University of Toledo, and the University of Michigan; and the volunteers and community workers who graciously shared their creative experiences for this study. iii Table of contents Dedication.

iii List of figures. vii List of tables. viii List of appendices .2 At the intersection of three scholarly debates.3 The policy context: digital inequality and democracy in the information age .4 Summary: the real world and the research questions. 16 Chapter 2 Review of the literature .1 Social network theory.2 The strength of weak ties .3 Where weak ties aren’t strong.1 Social capital to explain group behavior .2 Social capital to maintain the fabric of civil society .3 Social capital to obtain resources.1 What is community informatics? .2 The roots of community informatics.3 Community informatics and social capital/social network theory.

49 Chapter 3 Research design.2 Study scope and unit of analysis .3 Methodology: building on Granovetter .5 Data collection and analysis .1 Sampling and recruitment .4 Other critical tools in the field .5 Post-fieldwork analysis .6 The choice of Manchester as the research locale. 80 Chapter 4 Findings regarding ICT use.1 Introduction to the groups and their context.3 Social support groups.2 Twenty-five ICT activities.1 ICT practice: online text.2 ICT practice: use of the Web .3 ICT practice: mobile telephony.4 ICT practice: digital image and sound processing .5 ICT practice: data analysis .6 ICT practice: emergent technologies .3 Downloading, uploading, and cyberorganizing.4 A relationship between context and ICT use. 123 Chapter 5 Findings regarding social ties.1 Demographics of the volunteers and their social ties .2 Narrative analysis regarding social ties and ICT use .1 ICT help networks of two downloading groups.2 ICT help networks of two uploading groups.3 ICT help networks of two cyberorganizing groups.4 Making the connection to ICT help .3 Quantity of ties providing ICT help .4 Quality of ties providing ICT help .5 The role of the Manchester Community Information Network (MCIN). 152 Chapter 6 Implications and suggestions for further research.1 Recapitulation of the empirical findings .2 Implications of the empirical findings.3 Model and revised model .4 Anomalies and new questions brought to light.

193 vi List of figures Figure 1. Pasteur’s quadrant: scientific endeavor which is “use-inspired basic research. Connectivity of communities and community groups. Networks as ties between people, illustrated in (a) below, or as ties between clusters of people, as in organizations, illustrated in (b) below.4, Wellman and Berkowitz 1988, 45.

Typical personal network of an East Yorker.3, Wellman and Berkowitz 1988, 27. Examples of bridges between A and B. Strong ties are solid lines; weak ties are dotted lines. In both (a) and (b), A to B is a weak tie and a bridge, but in (b), A to B is of greater importance, as the alternative paths from A to B are much longer.

From figure 2, Granovetter 1973, 1365. Manchester’s wards, their Multiple Deprivation rankings, and the locale of the 31 community groups. Locating downloading, uploading, and cyberorganizing along a continuum from less to more extensive ICT use. Network diagram for tenant group 5 and its source of help with ICT, indicating tie strength and bonding social capital.

Network diagram for cultural group 18 and its source of help with ICT, indicating tie strength and bonding social capital. Network diagram for cultural group 23 and its sources of help with ICT, indicating tie strength and bonding social capital. Network diagram for support group 30 and its sources of help with ICT, indicating tie strength and bonding social capital. Network diagram for support group 31 and its sources of help with ICT, indicating tie strength and bonding social capital.

Empirically grounded model relating number of ties to ICT help. Theoretical model relating ICT use and social ties providing ICT help. Empirically grounded model, positing a relationship between social networks and a new concept called social information and communications technology, SICT. 166 vii List of tables Table 1.

Findings of 60 dissertation abstracts which test Granovetter’s Strength of Weak Ties theory. Strong and weak ties and bonding and bridging social capital, as defined in the community informatics literature. Operationalization of concepts as empirically observable indicators and as workable questions. Basic coding dictionary.

Brief descriptions of tenant groups. Brief descriptions of cultural groups. Brief descriptions of social support groups. Percent and number of 31 groups engaging in each of 25 ICT activities.

ICT facilities and Web sites across the 31 community groups. Downloading, uploading, and cyberorganizing, and average number of ICT activities per group. A pattern across social function and social context. Internet users in the UK, as percent of various demographic strata.

Demographics of community group volunteers and their social ties (help with ICT). Downloading, uploading, cyberorganizing, and average number of ties per group. Downloading, uploading, and cyberorganizing, and five measures of tie strength and social capital. Community groups’ reliance on MCIN for help with ICT.

151 viii List of appendices Appendix A. Community informatics studies using social capital/social networks concepts. Interview protocol for community group volunteers. Statistically significant correlations between downloading, uploading, cyberorganizing, and particular ICT activities.

Network diagrams of groups and their sources of ICT help. 192 ix Abstract Social networks, social capital, and the use of information and communications technology in socially excluded communities: a study of community groups in Manchester, England by Kathleen Hardin Williams Chair: Joan C. Durrance This study investigates grassroots community groups in low-income or (more specifically) socially excluded areas using information and communications technology (ICT) and the social ties that support their ICT use. How and to what purpose do groups not expected to use ICT—because they are formed from “digitally divided” populations—in fact do so? Who or what helps them use it? The study makes a contribution primarily to the field of community informatics, drawing concepts from social capital and social network theory (Granovetter, Lin, Putnam, Wellman).

Data concerning where community groups get help with ICT are analyzed to see whether and how strong and weak ties and bridging and bonding social capital play a role in helping the groups. x The study finds that having more ties providing ICT help—and more strong ties, more bonding social capital—is associated with more extensive ICT use by the community groups. Based on 25 measures of ICT, the groups fall into three progressively more extensive categories of ICT use: downloading (using computers and the Internet, particularly e-mail), uploading (maintaining a group Web presence), and cyberorganizing (helping others to become uploaders or downloaders). These three categories align with group purpose (tenant groups, cultural groups, or social support groups), suggesting that the groups use a particularly social form of ICT (SICT) relating very closely to group purpose.

The 31 groups are reaching across real or perceived digital divides in accessing help with ICT; the ties utilized are likely to be younger, more white, more male, and more in the workforce. The method helps to move the new field of community informatics beyond the case study by analyzing a sample of 31 community groups and their 62 ICT helpers. Empirical proof is provided via statistical tests on closed-end responses (quantitative) along with narratives extracted from interviews (qualitative). Social exclusion is often oversimplified, not taking into account the phenomenon uncovered here: groups that reach across ethnicity, class, gender, and generations for skilled help, yet stay close to their strong-tie, bonding-social-capital networks, relying largely on people in their own communities.

Policy models might usefully take into account the relatively invisible but active networks within socially excluded communities. xi Chapter 1 Introduction The research described here examines how ‘community groups’ in a set of ‘socially excluded communities’ adopt and use ‘information and communications technology’ (ICT). The research concerns a particular instantiation of the relationship between ‘technology and society.’ (Concepts within single quotation marks, along with others relevant to the study, will be defined in section 1.) In addition to describing the phenomenon, the proposed research identifies and characterizes the social ties that help these community groups adopt and use ICT. Following Granovetter (1973), are these ties weak or strong? Following Wellman and Berkowitz (1988) and Lin (2001), what can we learn about social networks and social capital from looking at the networks that provide people help with ICT? The answers to these questions have implications for policy as well for theory.

Knowledge about whom or what community groups rely on for help with ICT helps policymakers and funders better support efforts to overcome digital inequality. Such efforts include community projects, schools, libraries, e-governance, and even e- commerce. Moreover, new knowledge about social networks in socially excluded communities helps those same policymakers and funders understand how social exclusion functions or how it can be overcome. For instance, it appears that exchanging 1 help with ICT is an activity that bridges gaps within excluded communities, or between them and other communities.

Thus, it might be possible to activate additional such networks to tackle problems that parallel digital inequality: health, education, jobs, and so on. A primary research tool is the theory and the method of social network analysis. This theory and method guides both the qualitative and quantitative analysis, for this is a mixed-methods study. The analysis is carried out on data from 32 semistructured interviews and contextualized by means of document review, secondary sources, and background interviews.

The unit of analysis is the community group; one informed member of each of 32 groups served as a study participant. The study site of Manchester, England, and the research partner, the Manchester Community Information Network, together afford the opportunity to examine a set of community groups in low-income urban districts of an industrial metropolis, one with a tradition of community ICT initiatives and a modest number of studies analyzing these. The first chapter of this dissertation includes: 1. definitions of key concepts, 2.

a brief overview of the literature in which the proposed study is rooted (preliminary to a full literature survey in chapter 2), 3. discussion of the policy context of the study, and 4. a statement of the research problem.1 Definitions This section will provide working definitions of the following key concepts in this proposal: 1. socially excluded communities, 4.

digital divide/digital inequality, and uploaders and downloaders, 5. less-wired people and communities, 6. information and communications technology (ICT), 7. use of ICT, 8.

social networks, and 9. Before enumerating the concepts to be defined, it must be said that the research described in this dissertation relies on a particular conceptualization of the relationship between technology and society. Although in everyday language we are accustomed to speaking of the social impact of technology, technology does not itself cause social change.