7.1-Food Isn't My Only Strong Tie at Wegmans

Haythornewaite questions the conventional definition of the word ‘community’ arguing that social capital combined with reciprocity and interaction should be better indicators of a community rather than geographic location. This abstract, more “Gemeinschaft” viewpoint is what defines the social network perspective of community. In my experience, I found that my part-time work at Wegmans fulfills almost every aspect of Haythornewaite’s community.

When I was hired, there was certainly this shared focus of providing customer service and working together to help customers. A common language was likened to this Wegmans community, where terms used within the community wouldn’t be used outside the community. There was a interconnectivity among the workers at Wegmans.

Initially, though, we can consider Wegmans to be a community because of their self-described motto, “The Wegmans Family,” which infers community and pushes this cohesion that exists in a community; so an outsider might consider the Wegmans staff at a particular Wegmans along with its customers to already exist as a network community. This is also a good initiator of the common ground aspect of Social Network Analysis (SNA). Within the community, what Haythornewaite’s “actors relations and ties” begin to emerge and the network definition of community further unfolds.

Actors are simply defined in this context as people in the Wegmans community; however, Haythornewaite says, ”actors don’t have to always be individuals.” Furthermore, we begin to form what Haythornewaite describes as strong and weak ties based when we are hired. I began sifting through my ties with in my first hour of work a Wegmans. Because of the diverse staff, and the proximity of workers within department, stronger ties, ones which “actors maintain many relations, particularly when those relations include social and emotional support and intimacy or self-disclosure,” began to form (p.126) One person I was working with was around my age and shared similar views and thoughts, another was much older and less similar. Eventually, these discrepancies formed with more people I worked with and the stronger and weaker ties( ties where “little information is shared and when interaction is frequent”) surfaced. A whole social network of strong ties and weak ties is apparent.

These stronger ties (my friends at work) go even further in supporting the network view of community. As self-disclosure increases, along with reciprocity, other attributes of SNA emerge. One is social capital, which Haythornewaite describes as “a social resource embedded in and constituted by social networking ties.” For example, one of my co-workers who I had a strong tie with helped me get an internship with Wegmans by referring me to people and connecting me with the right people to talk to.
Another indicator of the network community was our associating with media multiplexity, where we used multiple forms of media to interact more frequently. Initially, it was probably Facebook in which we interacted but it has moved to e-mail, text messaging, cell phone, and outside of the geographic community to other face-to-face locations.

To me, this community describes Haythornewaite’s definition of the word. With sometime, these interactions incorporate multiple ways of forming and strengthening ties and building a social network. One interesting note I found is that this community is also comparable to group interaction, because there are created norms and conformity within the group and it can lead to the strengthening of cohesiveness within a group.