Abstract
Formerly preferred, but increasingly required, a college degree has become a prerequisite in a competitive job market. For Black undergraduates who continue to face systemic disparities in college completion, gaps in hiring are exacerbated by unequal access to leadership positions and professional training, such as internships, during college. Since informal connections and social networks heavily influence occupational access, this research article presents a relational, ethnographic approach to better understand the opportunities and constraints of networking for Black undergraduates in an urban campus context. This study advances prior social capital research by not only offering where networks exist but also presenting how they form and develop over time and across space. The findings show how Black students attending an urban, selective, and historically White institution (HWI) do not merely discover connections but deliberately construct them, illuminating the process through which social capital is made.
Over the last century, the U.S. economy has experienced major shifts, most notably from manufacturing employment to service industries (Anttiroiko et al., 2014). Recent technological advances speak to an emerging knowledge economy, which centers creativity and technical skill sets. Such changes have placed increased pressure on institutions of higher education to produce graduates who are “employable,” prepared with the “skills, knowledge, and abilities that will lead to productive employment” (Benbow & Hora, 2018, p. 483). Unemployment is a concern for all college students, but it impacts students from marginalized backgrounds differentially. Black Americans, for example, have an unemployment rate that is almost double that of White Americans with the same level of education (White, 2015). As it relates to those who have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, Black Americans have an unemployment rate of 4.1% compared to 2.4% for White Americans (White, 2015).
Access to employment is dependent on skills and networks. Employers want to hire individuals with necessary and applicable technical skills (Fischer, 2013; Hanc, 2017), but this study focuses on the other part of the hiring process—social capital and how its creation influences participants’ networks. Studies have found that the majority of open positions are not published on public platforms and suggest that networking is the primary process through which active candidates find jobs (Adler, 2016). Networking, which is the process that describes how individuals form professional connections to others, has an important influence on opportunity structures. Networking and its influence on the informal subtleties of the job market may provide insight into a key mechanism through which racial disparities occur that is often overlooked due to popular discourse about a lack of academic preparation and a workforce skills gap (United States Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 2017). In an increasingly interconnected society, exploring the impact of networking for students living and learning in urban geographies is important for equitable access to everchanging labor economies.
Undergraduate education, in particular, typically occurs at an important stage of adult development and networking matters within this temporal period. A student’s network informs not only how they select a major and career interest, but also influences their chances of finding and obtaining career opportunities within their field during and after college. Previous studies looked at social capital, social ties, and social networks for Black undergraduates (Brown & Davis, 2001; Greyerbiehl & Mitchell, 2014; Harper, 2009; Palmer & Gasman, 2008; Perna et al., 2009). These studies made significant contributions to determining the environments that support social capital development for Black students (e.g., Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Black Greek Letter Organizations) and those that are less conducive to fostering social capital development (e.g., Predominantly White Institutions and Historically White Institutions). For Black collegians at PWIs and HWIs in particular, prior studies have informed the presumption that they either have, or as is more often the case, do not have, social capital in comparison to other racial groups. Thus, existing research views social capital as an essence, ready-made, and impacting social outcomes. I see it as a process. Social actors do not merely have social capital. They make it.
Granovetter (1973) viewed social networks as the link between micro and macro levels of social inquiry. This perspective is similar to the position of relational sociology which asserts that people and society are extensions of their social networks (Tierney & Kolluri, 2020). This study builds on prior foundational work by picking up the charge for future social capital research to “employ methods to understand the complex relationships between resources based in social networks and educational attainment” (Dika & Singh, 2002, p. 41). Through a relational, ethnographic approach, this study explores two research questions: (1) How do Black undergraduates conceive of themselves in relation to their networks? (2) How do their perspectives inform the ways these connections develop through networking over time? As Du Bois (1996) asserted, racial categorization is informed by common histories, traditions, and impulses, suggesting there may be universal elements of the networking process for Black students attending historically White institutions within the United States context. Rather than viewing social capital in the binary as existent or not for a particular group, a relational approach provides insight into how individuals form and foster their networks, translating structural forces into everyday interactions and dynamic relationships.
This study includes data and insights based on the experiences of 10 Black college juniors and seniors over the course of an academic year attending an urban, selective, and historically White institution given the pseudonym “Western Coast University” (WCU). I observed aspects of their daily lives as they established connections across and beyond campus. The paper focuses on upperclassmen given their position as experienced college students who are more likely to have had declared their major and to have developed an awareness of professional and leadership experiences.
I begin with a review of current literature about the social networks of racially minoritized college students, especially Black students, as it relates to social capital, explicating their unique experiences given their racialized identification with a shared community. That section is followed by applying Bourdieu’s concept of field and social capital to understandings of networking and race, opening a space for relational approaches to these popular research topics. Next, I offer a more detailed exploration of the unique qualities of the selected research methodology- relational ethnography. I then present the particular methods and strategies that were implemented to bring this research approach to fruition. Finally, the findings are offered to illuminate the dynamic process of networking that creates social capital for students who identify as Black, as well as the complexities of how this process intersects with their diverse, intersectional identities, and experiences.
A Literature Review of Social Capital, Networking, and Black Collegians
Current literature about Black collegians and social capital tend to bifurcate the findings. One group of studies focuses on the barriers that Black students experience in building social capital at historically and predominantly White institutions of higher education, pointing to either a lack of social capital or showing how students find support from particular individuals and campus service offices. One study found that for the Asian-American, Latino and Black students they interviewed, social capital was facilitated by institutional agents who (1) shared common ground with them, (2) provided them with holistic support, (3) humanized their educational experiences, and (4) provided them with proactive help (Museus & Neville, 2012). Historically Black sororities are another source of social capital and act as facilitators of extended networks for Black women attending PWIs (Greyerbiehl & Mitchell, 2014). In a different context, a study at a university that serves primarily low-income, students of color found that African American students were constrained in utilizing “information, influence, and opportunity resources of their university contacts” (Parks-Yancy, 2012, p. 510), which negatively impacted their career plans. As these studies showed, racially minoritized students were assumed to lack access to social capital unless there were particular people who met the criteria they needed to establish relationships in a comforting and supportive manner. These perspectives of social capital speak to the factors that inform whether a connection exists or not, but do not show how relationships developed and potentially changed over time.
The other collection of studies tended to be located at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), suggesting that there was widespread institutional support for Black students and their development of social capital. One study proposed that by virtue of a particular Black college’s mission and history, academically underprepared African American men at this institution developed social capital through their relationships with faculty, personnel, and peers (Palmer & Gasman, 2008). The study suggested that this collective support represented a family-like structure and enhanced academic performance. Brown and Davis (2001) detailed in a conceptual piece that a primary role of HBCUs is that of “social capital purveyor” given their ability to provide students and graduates with, “a much larger reservoir of social capital because of the relations formed within the context of HBCUs that offer access to specific knowledge of the Black experience in America” (p. 42). These studies are valuable for understanding the environments that tend to support Black students. Extant higher education research can also benefit from diversifying the methods by which we study social capital by offering how networking occurs, develops, and changes over time. Before presenting the details of this study, I explore similar opportunities to advance current research about networks and social capital.
While there is extensive literature concerning social capital throughout various educational environments (e.g., Khalifa, 2010, Miller, 2012), research has not tackled how the process of networking unfolds for college students. Scholars often study networks by assuming they are developed in a linear fashion, rather than viewing networks as informed by multidimensional relationships that shift based on in-person and virtual interactions. Recent empirical pieces view and define networks from a social media perspective. Not focused explicitly on Black students, one study used survey data to determine that there was a strong association between college students’ use of Facebook and their bonding, bridging, and maintaining forms of social capital (Ellison et al., 2007). While social networking sites differ from earlier online communities in that they allow individuals to form new connections and maintain them over time, research about them has largely been about network structure, and not networking relationships (Ellison et al., 2007).
Scholarship that explicitly draws connections across the networking process, social capital development, and the college experiences for Black students are extremely limited. Networking with university personnel is one way that Black college students find social capital resources that can inform their career goals (Parks-Yancy, 2012). Given the gaps in social capital research, Parks-Yancy (2012) suggest, “it may be necessary for university employees to specifically emphasize the value of networking to the students” (p. 511). Another study looked at an informal networking group as a source of interpersonal support at a PWI for African American students (Grier-Reed, 2013). The researcher found that the group served as a better therapeutic intervention given that it was culturally sensitive as compared to formal mental health counseling (Grier-Reed, 2013). Even though the study focused on counseling and coping mechanisms, this piece called for future research that studies informal networking groups at PWIs that can support Black students. The study at the center of this paper does not aim to situate networking as a group or activity (e.g., a Black networking group), but instead uses relational ethnography to present networking as a process that Black college students engage in over time and across boundaries.
A Theory of Relational Networking Through the Concept of “Field”
The networking process is more than just an accumulation of networked connections; it consists of relationships that must be cultivated, making them vulnerable to temporal changes. Additionally, the networking process is context dependent, with fluid norms and expectations. In the following sections, I make the case for a relational understanding of networking through the concept of “field.”
Field as Foundational to Networking
Field and social capital are central to the networking process. Current social capital literature speaks to what networks look like, but not the process through which they are formed and developed. I propose that this process is dependent on field. Foundational sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defines field as, “a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 97). Its boundaries are determined by where the field’s effects end (Emirbayer, 1997). To Bourdieu, “to think in terms of field is to think relationally” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 96). Desmond (2014) uses this perspective to describe relational ethnography’s ability to contribute to field theory by observing the details of everyday interactions, which is further detailed in the methodology section.
In thinking about relationships between actors within a field, capital provides power. In spaces where power is contested through struggle, “relations between positions of force undergirds and guides the strategies whereby the occupants of these positions seek, individually or collectively, to safeguard or improve their position” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 101). Ultimately, power by virtue of capital can be used to transform or preserve forces within a field. This process of contestation and negotiation is inherent to the relational process of networking where the undergraduates at the center of this study are managing their relationships with members of their networks who hold varying positions of power within, and sometimes across, fields. The space that exists between structural systems and the minute interactions occurring through the process of networking in and around the university setting comprises the field of interest for this particular study. More specifically, fields include the spaces through which Black undergraduates are becoming socialized to transition from college to careers, and they differ by factors such as industry (i.e., majors, occupations) and social positions (e.g., classroom norms dependent on their position as a professor or student). As such, field is, “a relational configuration endowed with a specific gravity” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 19).
Social Capital as Relational
Social capital refers to resources, potential, and actualized, embedded in the institutionalized relationships among actors (Bourdieu, 1986). Based on an analysis of the network size and durability, the strength of these connections can be reduced, but not exclusively defined, to the form of economic capital. To Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), social capital networks are not based on the interconnectedness of objective, individual actors, but are instead dependent on ties that are unequally distributing resources amongst intentionally established social clusters. To this point, social capital as an aggregate of resources is based on how actors access their relationships as a means of profit within a social structure (Tzanakis, 2013).
The social capital framework from the perspective of Bourdieu can be used to provide a nuanced, relational understanding of the challenges that Black undergraduates face in building social capital. Bourdieu’s theorizing might explain the differences in the social capital of Black undergraduates as indicative of U.S. inequities. Social reproduction occurs because as individuals begin to develop the skills, aptitudes, or appetites for behaviors associated with success, these expectations shift allowing inequities to persist. For example, one might presume that Black undergraduates at an HWI could create more expansive social networks through a Black alumni affinity association. Yet, this organization might struggle to develop the same level of social and economic influence as the general alumni association. Given WCU’s status as a HWI and a history of White dominance in the U.S. context, White students may feel more comfortable accessing the general alumni association than their Black peers. A deeper understanding of this vision of social capital is needed to better comprehend systems of social reproduction and its relational nature. The dynamic relationship between field and social capital necessitates relational approaches to understanding the networking process and the particular challenges and opportunities that Black collegians experience approaching graduation.
Race as Racialized
As a social construction with an extensive global history, race is an outcome of individual, group, and societal conceptions. It is lived, performed, and enforced through interactions and relationships. In comparison to the term “racial,” “racialized” signals the fluid and heterogeneous qualities of racial boundaries (Nasir, 2011). These boundaries are created at the nexus of structural influences and everyday interactions, mutually informing what we believe race to be and what we make it. As a result, “race (and thus racial identities) is not an inherent category but rather is made racial through social interaction, positioning, and discourse” (Nasir, 2011, p. 5). Even though the study participants identify as Black, Blackness is multifaceted and race is only one element of their complex identities. So while a racial designation is a tool for drawing a boundary, as is necessary to develop a sample, participants’ self-identification as Black is understood as one piece of their dynamic racialized experiences. The relational perspective facilitates a more holistic understanding of how elements of a student’s racialized identity become more or less salient in different spaces and at various moments throughout the networking process. Additionally, a relational lens provides an opportunity to observe and analyze how differential power dynamics influence these relationships, which is detailed methodologically in the following section.
Relational Ethnography: A Methodological Approach
Social capital is relational in that it is inhered in the linkage between at least two entities. While prior work has labeled social capital as a resource, that definition discounts the process that turns a relationship into an asset. Even though social capital is established through relational ties, an explicitly relational approach has not been used to understand the process through which social capital is made as Black undergraduates at PWIs and HWIs form their networks. For this reason, relational ethnography is a methodological approach that can allow research to witness the process of networking as it happens. As Desmond (2014) outlines, “relational ethnography involves studying . . . processes rather than processed people,” (p. 547) as compared to traditional ethnography which tends to focus on a group or place. The benefits of a relational approach arise from additional analytical opportunities for understanding intersections and conflicts among and between individual and group identities by centering a particular process.
In thinking about the complexity of Bourdieu’s concept of field, relational ethnography helps foster understanding about the ecology of a field, described as, “the internal logics of distinct but interconnected social worlds” (Desmond, 2014, p. 557). As opposed to traditional ethnography, which is bounded by a setting, relational ethnography is defined by relations which require embeddedness in a process (i.e., networking) rather than a place (i.e., a Black cultural center). For Black students who may manage other racial and ethnic identities while moving through multiple worlds at an HWI, an ethnographer that limits their data collection and analysis to a particular group or place imposes limits on the field of interest. Alternatively, since this approach is based on configurations of relations, this study aims to watch the process of networking unfold for undergraduates for whom their Blackness is only one facet of their holistic personhood. Methodological inquiry from this perspective requires rapport building and personal, consistent interaction with participants. I observed students throughout their daily experiences, as they attended classes and events. This allowed for invisible processes to become visible showing how students make social capital through networking, or not, with other entities across lines of power and difference. The following sections detail the challenging, yet necessary, work of delineating boundaries for relational inquiry as well as the methods that were employed for data collection and analysis. Strategies conducted to build trustworthiness as well as limitations of the study are also offered.
Boundary Setting: Participants and Place
A relational approach to observing the experiences of Black undergraduates engaging in the process of networking opens an analytical space for studying “boundaries rather than bounded groups” as Desmond (2014) encourages. A substantialist approach, which assumes entities are bounded and clearly distinct, might use a survey or interview to determine a student’s social ties. Alternatively, relational ethnography uses detailed participant observations to witness the transactions that individuals take part in to produce the phenomena of interest: networking. In addition to individual interviews with participants, I opted to conduct interviews with members of each participant’s network too, which provided details about how the other side of a student’s tie understands the dynamics of their relationship in an attempt unearth the components of the relation at the center. As a result, this methodology provides detailed data and perspectives that inform not just the initiation of a connection, but also the intricate aspects of how a relationship is fostered, maintained, and potentially changed over time- particularly in an urban space that is both geographically and socially dense. Insights from these participants can help educators understand how networking influences economic opportunity.
To recruit Black student participants in a manner that refrained from reducing their identities to particular groups or locations, they were selected based on informal interactions resulting from building relationships around campus (see Table 1 for study participants). For example, one student was recruited through my participation in an open enrollment meditation class for WCU students and staff and another was recruited through the Black cultural center on campus. While WCU serves as a space for catalyzing connections between the researcher and participants, it is not an exclusive boundary in that participants network inside and outside of its walls. Shadowing a student facilitating a letter-writing campaign in a nearby neighborhood and attending another participant’s 21st birthday party are instances where the campus boundaries may have inspired their recruitment for the study but did not limit the bounds of relational research.
Demographic Characteristics of Study Participants.
The relational approach provided important access to extended social networks by offering opportunities to see budding and long-standing connections based on rapport building with participants. My experience as a multiethnic woman of color with Caribbean roots in addition to my status as a WCU graduate student assisted me in the rapport building process. My racial, ethnic, and gendered positions offered me what Bernal (1998) calls “cultural intuition” shown through my reflexive understanding of self in the context of shared collective cultural experiences and community memory as WCU students. In alignment with my own identity, the study participants identified, at least in part, as Black but also had many other aspects of their identities that nuanced their experiences. Unfortunately, these other qualities could not be addressed in as much detail as participants’ racial identity within the scope of this paper (e.g., sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, etc.). The intention of this particular study is to explore some of the elements of their shared, racialized experiences engaging in the networking process.
Data Collection and Analysis
In total, I conducted over 80 hours of data collection related to the study participants over the course of the year. Data sources included longitudinal interview data as well as participant observation memos and recordings from shadowing opportunities gathered by attending individual classes, meetings, and events with students. I also connected with participants via social media through platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. To gather a more complete understanding of the power dynamics inherent in some of their networked relationships, I conducted observations and interviewed individuals whom I had witnessed participants engaging with through the networking process, such as their professors, mentors, and classmates. The collected data, rich with thick description, provided detailed insight into how participants located services, sought advice, and negotiated decisions about leadership, internship, and employment opportunities- collectively informing how they engaged in the networking process.
Interview transcripts, memo data, and social media posts (such as Facebook events that participants invited me to) were captured, uploaded, and analyzed using NVivo software. The data were first analyzed chronologically so that I could develop an understanding of the timeline over which I observed participants’ experiences and relationships. This allowed me to place interviews within the context of the academic year and the individual’s particular stage in their college career.
The second level of analysis involved drawing connections across the data based on interpersonal relations. For example, in trying to understand the dynamics between a participant named Ava and her Acting Theory professor, I needed to look at memo data from my observation of her class as well as transcript data from my interview with this professor to code elements of their observable interactions, comparing it to notes about how the professor and participant made sense of their relationship. This process helped me understand how their particular networking dynamic functioned in the final semester of Ava’s senior year and the extent to which this faculty member was present, or not, as Ava transitioned into her post-graduate career.
The final level of analysis required bringing together sets of relationships into a more expansive model that parsed out each participant’s network. I mapped on power dynamics inherent in each of these connections based on their position (e.g., as a student, employee, mentee, peer, etc.). These network maps delineated who students were connected to. I used descriptive memos to elucidate the power dynamics of each relationship as well as noticeable shifts in a given tie over the course of the study based on observation and interview data. As I created these relational networking stories for each participant, I then considered their commonalities and differences to inform two main themes about how social capital is made, which are presented in the findings.
Trustworthiness
To ensure the trustworthiness of the study and its findings I employed two strategies. First, I used social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, as secondary sources for triangulating interview and observation data. For example, a college junior named Joseph mentioned that he used platforms like Twitter and Instagram as major sources of networking, especially with social justice advocates off campus and in the local community. Through an analysis of his feeds and followers, I validated his participation in this virtual community. The second and most important strategy for trustworthiness involved member checks during a focus group which was held 6 months after the study concluded. Half of the participants were present and upon offering my initial hunches regarding the main findings, study participants shared their thoughts and ensured that their experiences, voices, and perspectives were shared accurately. They also helped fill in details that they deemed necessary for understanding a more holistic story of their relationships in the context of their social networks.
Limitations
A methodological limitation of this study involved the difficulty of understanding the totality of a participant’s network. The sample size and the time requirements of observing students’ courses, meetings, and general social interactions in addition to conducting interviews with members of their networks, posed a real challenge. While this means that only a few relationships were captured out of many, this study makes a unique contribution to social capital and social network literature as a first attempt to see the multi-dimensionality of social connections and the networking process.
Another potential limitation involves the recruitment of participants. While this was not the case for everyone, many of the students who agreed to allow me to shadow them were individuals who I met through the Black cultural center on campus. Even students who were not recruited directly through the site proved to have connections to the center anyway, which I noticed throughout my time in the Black cultural center space given that I visited frequently for a prior research project. There was wide variation in their individual levels of engagement with the center, but its consistent presence in their lives offers an interesting shared context to their broader connections as Black students at this HWI.
Findings: Forming and Maintaining Connections
Unlike prior social capital studies, a relational, ethnographic approach to social capital centers the process of networking, rather than a location or group. Therefore, data was gathered and analyzed based on longitudinal interviews, observations, social media posts, and conversations with individuals in participants’ networks which informed two main themes. First, when initially forming connections, participants were grappling with whether their Black identities should be placed at the forefront of a given interaction or pushed aside. Second, in their efforts to maintain particular connections, participants engaged in the networking process to either sustain their status as students or advance their position as aspiring professionals. To advance prior work about networking, these findings use a variety of data sources to depict the multidimensional, nonlinear nature of informal networks of affiliation that are central to how these Black juniors and seniors develop social capital today within the 21st-century context of a socially networked environment.
Forming Connections: Centering Blackness, or Pushing it Aside
As I embarked upon this relational, ethnographic study, one of the first interactions I had with each participant was an initial interview where we discussed what they thought about networking, how they engaged in the process, as well as the individuals and groups that constituted their network at that time. The sample shared similar sentiments: networking was an awkward, but necessary process, especially as they embarked upon the latter half of their college careers. Participants associated a societal definition of “networking” with negative qualities such as acting “fake” or behaving “too formal.” As Ava, a senior theatre major, shared, “I hate networking and I hate that word. It makes me feel so gross.” She recalled a recent summer television internship where the company held networking events and encouraged the interns to attend. She continued: The gag is we’re all the same age. We can just be friends. I don’t understand this network. It seems like you’re trying to get something out of everyone. We would have these soirées with these people- prior interns or they run this or that company. . . but it’s also that pressure of you have to meet people. I feel like they can smell desperation on people.
An international student from the British Virgin Islands and a junior in the public relations department, Erivo, shared her perspective: I can smell it [networking] a mile away when somebody is trying to make a connection just for the sake of making it. So I think networking isn’t something that you should always actively be doing, driving towards. It’s something that should happen naturally.
As she points out, participants could establish personal relationships that made the networking process appear less forced and more genuine to them. Ronald, a junior economics major and commuter student, viewed networking as meaningful relationships that could result in opportunities on or off campus. He noticed that Black students at WCU were not just leaders in Black student clubs, like the Black Student Union, but were also taking on positions of influence in major-related organizations, like those that existed in the business, arts, and medical schools. Though they shared diverse takes on networking, Ava, Erivo, and Ronald seemed to agree that they preferred when networking was genuine.
Students also shared their assessment that networking happened differently for Black individuals depending on the context. Maya, who was a senior and communications major, worked to shift her thinking from seeing networking as a system of benefits to establishing friendships. I witnessed this first-hand through her friendship with a Black woman who was a graduate student named Aubrey in the same department. When describing how they met, Maya reflected, We just started talking because there’s not a lot of Black people there [their job at the school of communications]. Usually, that always happens. When you see one, you’re like, “Hey girl, how you doing? Are you doing okay?”. . . That’s basically kind of how it happened because we see each other a couple of times a week in the office and just talk. We ended up hanging out outside. I don’t remember how we hung out the first time. We noticed like, “oh we both want to work in television and film.” She wants to write and create stuff and I do, too. We clicked on that stuff.
Aubrey shared a similar story when I interviewed her, describing their initial interactions as just “hi and bye” and reiterating their shared interest in film. I asked what she noticed about how Maya networks and forms connections. Aubrey affectionately referenced Maya as “little sis” and explained, “She is really personable, it’s always like, with a smile.” In her own definition of networking, Aubrey similarly described the process as “genuine connection” and noted that Maya was actually teaching her how to network by reminding her to go into interactions without expectations, which Maya had mentioned as an early lesson learned. Maya showed Aubrey how to use platforms, like Twitter, to form connections. As Black women interested in the television and film industries, both Maya and Aubrey bonded over their experiences of feeling underrepresented in industry spaces and found connection by supporting one another with those challenges and developing useful skill-sets. The intersection of their racial and gender identities in the context of the entertainment field put these qualities at the center of their initial and continued interactions.
For Minroe, a junior and transfer student, chatting with individuals who he identified as Black during career fairs, for example, was the main strategy he mentioned when we first talked. As he reflected, I try to work at the Black tables first. It’s easier for me to form, you know, and carry a conversation with Black people. They usually seem more intrigued with me and, you know, more eager to help me.
Other participants’ views aligned with this notion. When thinking about networking in the abstract, they expressed that talking to fellow Black individuals was easier to do initially. To Sally, a senior studying accounting, she differentiated the intraracial levels of formality based on how Black students might network with one another compared to how Black professionals may engage the same process. In her own words, I would say it depends on the setting because I feel like Black college students networking is more jokes, and less formal, and more go with the flow as opposed to I’ve joined, I guess, I’ve technically joined [major accounting firm’s] African American network, and they’ve done a couple of luncheons, and things like that. Even though it was still jokes, and it was still light-hearted and fun, it was more like, “Okay, what do you do? How did you get here? Blah, blah, blah.” More formal questions are being asked.
Students acknowledged that there was likely a balancing act that informed how they might network with Black peers compared to the dynamics present in Black professional spaces, like working groups and career fairs.
Through the shadowing process, I witnessed the minute interactions and informal conversations that influenced how participants went about forming connections in alignment with what they shared during interviews. Within the context of these interactions, I observed how students’ racialized identities shaped how they formed connections in their social and professional circles, which spanned various fields. Classroom observations, for example, often helped situate how participants connected to their peers and professors. Often the only Black student in a classroom, participants were usually friendly and cordial in these environments. They actively engaged in group work and participated in classroom discussions. Earl, a senior communications major from New York City, frequently supported his classmates during their presentations with active nods and affirming applause, most prominent during student speeches in his public speaking course. In a more specific instance that occurred during a group presentation about a case study reading for her management class, Sally, who was visibly the only Black individual in a class of more than 30 students, actively engaged her peers. She sat in the front of the classroom while her fellow group members stayed in the back row so that when her professor finished her introductory lesson, Sally could quickly set up the Jeopardy game on the screen to start her group’s facilitated activity. Sally introduced the lesson and alleviated her classmates’ anxious faces with a brief instruction, “Side note: all of the answers are in the reading, so if you open that up you will find it.” She did not seem to be close friends with her peers in this course. Yet, she exerted confidence in the material which she demonstrated through her presenter role to assert her place in the classroom as a form of connecting to her peers and her professor.
In addition to behaviors during class that helped communicate interpersonal and professional skills, participants also engaged with faculty in specific ways to create and foster connections. This occurred during scheduled times, like office hours, as well as less structured attempts, such as conversations after class. At the close of her acting theory class, Ava initiated a conversation with her professor who appeared to be a White woman. Ava asked if she had seen the recent play that had taken a much different interpretation of Chekhov, the Russian playwright, whose classical piece they had just performed in class. They spoke for a few minutes, bantering about the merits of the translated performance. In a later one-on-one conversation that I had with this same professor, she shared her thoughts about Ava’s talents: I’m not aware of treating them [students of color] any differently or finding any unusual variations as a pattern in what I see with them. I can think of a handful, and I would include Ava in this and another woman, another African-American woman who took this same class last year, who really excelled in the work and were willing to really take on roles that were distinct. . . . When I cast people in scenes, I don’t really worry about that [race/ethnicity]. I worry about their talent more and what I think will stretch them when I give them the roles.
For her professor, race was not central to their connection or her assessment of Ava’s acting abilities. While her statement could be interpreted as race-neutral (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) from a more structural, rhetorical perspective, a relational approach focuses on the intricacies of their interactions. One’s agency and the field where it functions, which in this case included experience with and knowledge of traditional, and sometimes White-dominated, conceptions of classical theater and related theories, allowed Ava to create social capital which established a bridge for her to connect with her professor. With an understanding of the professor’s perspectives and knowledge of their relationship through class and Ava’s work-study position in their department’s main office, Ava’s Black identity was far less visible in the context of their interactions. To advance prior research about social capital, the relational ethnographic approach creates opportunities for seeing how students formed a variety of connections given different power dynamics. The relational approach helps paint a more full picture of how students’ perceptions of their race and that of an individual they are interacting with informs the dynamic nature of their connection. Within the confines of campus racial climates (Hurtado, 1992; Stokes, 2020), Black students must negotiate race and power in their everyday interactions.
Maintaining Connections: Using Networking to Sustain or Advance
The second finding delves further into how participants continue to foster social capital when maintaining connections through networking to either sustain their academic and social status as students or advance their position as future professionals. Instead of a static picture of what a participant’s network might look like at a particular moment, shadowing students over the course of the academic year allowed me to see not just how they met new people, but also how they engaged in the networking process over time to develop relationships beyond initial connections. Participants varied based on the networking processes they engaged in, which led to using relationships to sustain their student status or advance their professional standing.
For this finding I focus on two participants: Minroe and Joseph. Both participants traversed similar fields as a result of their common interests in social justice and political science. Based on what they shared in our initial discussions, Minroe was only recently working on expanding his network beyond close friends and the Black cultural center, which he frequented. He had not worked for two semesters and knew he needed connections to land a professional summer internship. Joseph, on the other hand, was actively involved and had even started taking on leadership responsibilities in both his on and off campus commitments as president of the Justice in Palestine group as well as the events coordinator for a local political movement organization.
In the fall semester, I attended a documentary screening with Minroe and Joseph. At the close of the screening event, Minroe stayed seated while Joseph got up to introduce himself to Professor Charles, one of the panelists and a faculty member at WCU who identified as a Black man. Joseph followed up via email to ask for a seat in the professor’s spring course. In my interview with Professor Charles at the end of the school year, he recalled this catalyzing interaction. As he described their communication since their initial meeting, One of the things that is really impressive with him is how professional he is. So he’s very good about the email and when he comes to talk to you after class, it’s very respectful and very professional. . .I did an event, he came. He did an event, I went to his event. He came to dinner, you know, we met outside after class a couple times just to talk more informally, but I am hoping that we can continue.
Professor Charles went on to discuss Joseph’s interest in graduate school and the ways he wanted to support his future steps. In this professor’s personal reflection, he shared that if there was one thing he could have done differently in his own graduate program it would be the following, “I wish I had done more networking with the other scholars and students of color.” Throughout our conversation, he mentioned the importance of mentorship and connection to Black undergraduates, and Black men in particular, since this interest informed a shared identity for him. He pointed to Joseph’s development as an activist and mentioned his desire to support “how he wants to make an impact on the world.” This example is not meant to suggest that mentorship should be based on racial match only. Instead, it is indicative of how a student networked to find, foster, and maintain a relationship with a professor who understood his interests and could invest in his future professional goals. With his power, influence, and experience as a Black man and a professor, this faculty member is positioned to help Joseph as he considers graduate school after earning his college degree while also having the capacity to offer insights about racialized academic environments.
Alternatively, Minroe described himself as social, but not very intentional about making professional connections. Yet, his friendship with Joseph was encouraging him to push himself outside of his comfort zone. Throughout the year, I observed Minroe’s social media posts about attending protests, which he usually did with Joseph. Over time, he got more involved on campus by joining a student organization for Black men. When reflecting on his network, Minroe shared that it was based heavily in a social “Black WCU” community. While he valued this aspect of his contacts, he also recognized the ways it was limiting. I observed a meeting Minroe had with a peer who appeared to be a White man and who was his partner for his oral exam in his Spanish class. As they wrapped up their practice session, Minroe asked where his partner was headed next. He pointed over to the library and said that was where he worked. Minroe inquired as to how he got that job, murmuring to himself that he never heard back from the staff at the library when he applied. His partner said he got the position from a friend. I reflected to myself that perhaps Minroe did not have that additional connective networking layer, like his peer did, that pulls a name out of a pile of interested job applicants. During one of our later interviews in the spring semester, Minroe mentioned an interest in applying for an executive board position for the Black men’s student organization he joined but was not aware of the exact process for doing so. He figured that his informal friendships would facilitate this process, “I’m very good friends with all of the e-board members, so I should probably talk to them about that. I feel like I got it in the bag. But, I don’t know.” Minroe may have had key connections, but he was not usually in a position to nurture and make use of his relationships.
For Minroe, networking helped him access necessary resources. His contacts at the cultural center provided him with social-emotional support and access to the food pantry, which he mentioned needing on multiple occasions. He most often used his network to facilitate the important challenge of surviving as a college student. Minroe experienced many personal barriers, struggling at times academically as a student at WCU, whereas Joseph was at a point in his student and professional development where he had learned to cultivate his relationships over time, providing him with opportunities to activate his network to advance through leadership and professional opportunities. The dynamic that I witnessed not simply between Minroe and Joseph, but also with their respective and at times overlapping networks, helped illuminate how networking through the creation of social capital differed for these two participants. Fellow participants shared in this struggle as they worked to determine how to leverage personal relationships into professional connections against the backdrop of inequitable power structures and access to resources.
Discussion
Research often seeks to understand people and relationships, so it should not be surprising that there is extensive literature in education about social capital and networks. Extant literature has applied the foundational work of prior scholars, like Pierre Bourdieu, as a means for explaining how the ties between individuals and the nature of those ties allow societal inequities to reproduce across generations. Social capital research has described which individuals and groups tend to be connected (e.g., privileged versus oppressed groups) as well as the characteristics of those ties (e.g., weak versus strong ties), but has yet to capture how the process of networking unfolds and how one’s racialized identity shapes how relationships start, develop, and potentially change over time. Prior studies view social capital as an essentialized resource and study what this resource provides in a given setting, as is characteristic of traditional ethnography. This study uses relational ethnography to center the relations among individuals that allow the networking process to occur. The findings contribute to what is understood by offering how Black students in particular think about traditional conceptions of networking as rigid and fake. Given these perspectives, they engage in the process in what they envision as genuine and meaningful ways with peers and professors. Additionally, the analysis shows how their reflections inform their engagement in the networking process with others, and how others reflect on their engagement with them in return. Therefore, the findings also illuminate how power dynamics and race can influence a social tie. Rather than view ties essentially as existent or not, the extent to which race is considered rather than ignored, or viewed “neutrally”, informs their strength and usefulness. As such, the findings depict how social capital is not merely discovered but actively and deliberately constructed.
To further clarify the distinction in comparison to prior research, consider this alternative. At WCU, the Black cultural center and Black student union meetings were places and events where my participants frequented. A researcher employing a more traditional approach might have focused on conducting observations in these spaces exclusively. Alternatively, to understand the Black student network, they could have also surveyed a representative proportion of the Black undergraduate population at WCU and mapped out the connections, using frequency of interactions and interviews. While useful for showing which students are connected and potentially the strength of their ties, traditional approaches cannot advance comprehension about what it looks like to engage in the networking process. Based on current research, we do not know the necessary steps and minute interactions that turn an initial introduction into a friend, mentor, or employer.
A relational approach to social capital helped produce findings about participants and the multidimensionality of the relations that constitute their connections, creating opportunities to mold multiple interactions into personal and professional relationships. By seeking to observe networking as it happens, centering the process rather than a place, participants are understood in nuanced ways. They are not only college students as traditional research suggests, but they are also friends, partners, club members, roommates, and employees. Relational work provides access to observe participants as they traverse fields and the norms of their academic, social, and professional environments moving from classes, to office hours, to club meetings, to social events. Even though this paper is framed by participants’ positions as Black college students, interviews with their professors, friends, and mentors in addition to observations of their interactions over the course of the year provided thick descriptions of the complex union of their networks. These relationships are not static. They require attention and repeated, meaningful moments of connection to develop over time and across space. Through the data gathered by this approach, we can learn about the opportunities and barriers that Black students experience in forming and maintaining connections through the networking process.
Conclusion
Using a relational lens and an ethnographic methodology provided the opportunity to watch networking occur, or not occur, without imposing boundaries that would essentialize the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the networking process not yet captured by traditional substantialist social capital and social network research. While a more typical approach might limit the confines of the study to a college campus, a relational ethnographic approach understands that an individual’s identity as a student is just one of the many lives they lead as family members, community leaders, and burgeoning professionals. Opportunities to better understand how both a participant and a more powerfully positioned professor view race in relation to their academic department, for example, is another way to understand networks as more than a tie. These ties are also informed by notions and experiences that dictate the potential to form and maintain particular relationships that allow networking to occur. Relational ethnographic methods are a useful tool for educational research of the future (Tierney & Kolluri, 2020). In the 21st-century context where connections develop in different ways, such as through texting and social media platforms, unique approaches to understanding topics that have been studied for decades, such as social capital, must be used to address dynamic relations.
In addition to presenting a different methodological approach, developing a deeper understanding of how networking happens for Black undergraduate students matters at a time when disparities in opportunity persist. As undergraduates, students are competing for access to campus jobs, leadership positions, and internships to develop skills and remain competitive for job offers upon graduation. This pressure grows as college costs increase and students and their families are squeezed by loan debt and a changing labor market where employment is increasingly temporary and less likely to provide long-term benefits (Cottom, 2017). In addition to developing pertinent skillsets, networking has an important influence on how applicants prepare, find, and secure employment in a competitive market. This research helps explore how networking happens during college for Black students, illuminating not just where social capital exists, but how social capital is made.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education for their small grant support through the Internal Research Funds program.
