Abstract
This article presents two case studies, linked together as chained projects, as examples of public sociology involving university/community partnerships. Research described here illustrates specific ways that applied sociology and public sociology can be put to work to address community problems. While the projects described here are an important focus, the article argues that they are primarily valuable in showing how a regional resource exchange network can be set up over a period of decades and how the presence of these partnerships creates the possibility for one project to chain into another. We describe this chaining as a resource exchange network and as a “virtual organization.” Virtual organizations are intentionally created, possess internal logic, and contain a set of actors who carry out interdependent roles. Virtual organizations lack formal structure and require a minimum of organizational maintenance. The chaining method and the associated virtual organization help to bring university actors and resources to bear on helping to solve community problems.
This paper is ostensibly a description of the health needs assessment we conducted with a team of undergraduate students for the Brown Ridge School District (BRSD) in rural Central Pennsylvania. While we describe this as a discrete project with a community partner, the work was actually situated within an ongoing flow of partnerships, other projects, and organized action among perhaps 50 partners from different institutional arenas. These partners are situated in a rural river valley area that is about 50 miles in diameter, ringed by ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. This article describes the nature of the regional partnerships, how these unfolded during and after the BRSD Project, and why the organizational form is useful for supporting applied research that is helpful to the community and aids in teaching sociology to undergraduates.
We have been working in the same region of Pennsylvania for nearly 30 years building historical, cultural, and relational knowledge. During this time period, we have chained together projects and developed an expertise in the region through the process of slow sociology, by weaving ourselves as university members into the fabric of the community. This approach is perfectly suited to providing rich and meaningful applied research opportunities for students and for us to engage in public sociology.
Specifically, we are connected to the community of individuals and organizations throughout the region who are actively engaged in identifying and addressing social problems. Our approach led us to the BRSD Health Needs Assessment project and, in turn, to the Central Susquehanna Affordable Care Act project, both of which have integrated students into community-university partnerships focused on health. These partnerships are the outgrowth of the activities of individuals loosely associated through the virtual organizational structure of the Susquehanna Institute.
Virtual Organizations as a Type of Regional Partnership
We use the name Susquehanna Institute to describe the regional network of organizational partnerships responsible for creating the chain of projects we describe. We do this in part from a need for a concise, parsimonious term to use when referring to the project chaining and relationships we are describing (Milofsky, 2008c). It happens that Susquehanna Institute had an existence as a formally incorporated nonprofit organization that a small group of our members created in 1990 with the intention of creating a “virtual organization” (Milofsky and Messer 1998). The incorporated organization has been defunct for a number of years. However, the regional partnerships that originally grew out of projects created by the Susquehanna Institute have endured and expanded over more than 25 years.
Although its formal trappings as an administrative organization disappeared, the virtual organization persisted. There was a set of functional relationships, repeated tasks that actors carried out (particularly in seeking student field placements that did important work for community partners), and roles for core actors that were continually recreated over the years. With the expansion of computers, virtual organization has become a more common concept, as companies can exist, produce products, and expand even though they have no office, and as the personnel who carry out work change and the actual ways work is carried out might change (Hedberg 1997). A virtual organization is related to the idea of the network organization, where individuals and companies partner to carry out tasks and produce products even though they do not create a formal, enduring structure (Milofsky 2008a; Powell 1990).
Both virtual organizations and network organizations are recognized as being productive, task-completing systems even though they do not have formal boundaries, hierarchies, or bureaucratized divisions of labor. Rather, they are evolving systems for completing tasks and creating value, and systems that create enduring commitments, assimilate inputs, and generate outputs that are meaningful to a clientele. In this, they fit the definitions of “organization” given by Thompson (1967) and Stinchcombe (1983), even though they do not fit traditional definitions of administrative organizations.
In creating Susquehanna Institute, we had the specific intentions of creating an organizational form that would escape the trap of resource dependency that many nonprofits face (Aldrich 1979), and avoiding asymmetrical and hierarchical relationships between us—people who operate in universities—and our community partners (Feeney 1997). We hoped that resources would be acquired and controlled by partner organizations. Partnerships would include people who were outside the boundaries of the managing organization. This resource-use strategy would enable the possibility of an ever-evolving and changing collection of actors from other institutions and allow for project flexibility. Enabling community partners to hold the financial resources also generates a more equitable distribution of power across university/community boundaries and helps to minimize the way academic expertise might create hierarchy (Rothschild and Whitt 1986; Taylor 1979). Therefore, a central purpose of the partnership is “translational”—reconfiguring expert, technical knowledge so that it can be understood and used by community members and leaders who may have less formal education but generally have more experiential knowledge (Larson and Milofsky 2013). In our experience and in our conceptual orientation, community partners are fully co-equal with university people in terms of intelligence, often in terms of training, and nearly always in terms of their situated “practice” knowledge (Lindblom and Cohen 1979; Milofsky et al. 1993; Pauly 1991; Tanner et al. 1993; Vosk and Milofsky 2002a, 2002b, 2002c).
It is our belief that interactions between university people and community partners often break down because of structural dynamics that bedevil the relationships and unfounded expectations both parties have about expertise. These expectations are generated not so much by the individuals who are participating in a project but because of the ways that people are socialized into professional roles, and the way that community members and university actors carry these understandings into new partnerships. Virtual organizations such as the Susquehanna Institute can mitigate these dynamics because, to survive, they must be able to create a sequence or chain of projects over time, which allows partners to develop trust and a clear understanding of the skills, influence, and capacity to act that each party possesses and can bring to a new undertaking. In this way, interactional mechanisms are produced that reduce the influence of socialized differences (Allport 1955).
Creating a Virtual Organization: Chaining and Slow Sociology
We have presented the Susquehanna Institute as a virtual organization. It is also a resource-sharing exchange built upon an interdependence of organizational actors within the networks that expands over time, creating what we call a “social treasury” (Milofsky 2008c). Each partner has both needs and excess assets residing in some parts of their operation. Partnering allows for more efficient completion of necessary tasks. Sharing is particularly important in the context of Central Pennsylvania because the area is “undermanned” (Barker and Gump 1964; Lipset 1950). This is a rural part of northern Appalachia that contains many low-income areas with high rates of poverty, and a few pockets of affluence. Government, nonprofit, and community organizations all find resources to be scarce, making it difficult for them to autonomously complete necessary projects. There also tends to be a shortage of expertise and technical resources so local governments and organizations have created “quasi” nonprofits in education and in planning, which allow them to pool their resources to hire people who can carry out difficult data collection and analysis tasks.
The partnering that exists within the Susquehanna Institute, thus, makes use of a style of joint action that is familiar in the valley. We use the practical and philosophical approach of Assets-Based Community Development (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). In the assets-exchange approach, we ask what it is, in realistic terms, that university people have to offer to community partners and why community actors would want to partner with university people. In our region, we are viewed as having substantial material resources that can be channeled into community projects (computers and computer skills, printing, and student volunteer help are the most important). As professionals, we also have time to work on and develop participatory research projects, and we have a professional orientation toward stating a project in formal terms and carrying it through to completion. We do not view these as skills exclusively held by university professionals, but as by-products of the work conditions of university life.
It is important to recognize that it often costs community people in terms of time and special effort to partner with university staff and our students. Our community partners have taken risks by accepting students into their organizations, working both as members of our research teams and as interns. Just as university people have vocational characteristics that are an asset in our partnerships, the expertise of our community partners make important contributions because of their professions and the fields of human services within which they are employed. Throughout the case studies presented below, we highlight different examples of expertise held by our partners from which we have benefited.
Not surprisingly, one way that we have all been able to work together effectively across a range of projects is by consistently talking together about what needs and assets all parties bring with them. The targeted conversations we have with local municipal leaders and organization leaders are intended to discover the functional problems they face, problems that we can solve through our access to technology and low cost, highly skilled student labor. These often are open-ended discussions in which none of us have anticipated the joint projects we could discover together. Such a conversation led to our project to use student surveyors and faculty with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) skills to map blighted housing. This is information the towns desperately needed to gain access to Community Development Block Grant money. These conversations also provide us as sociologists with a greater understanding of when and how the relationships we are trying to develop in the Susquehanna Institute can actually lead to partnerships and exchanges of resources.
The blighted housing project helped the city manager we were meeting with to understand the kinds of help university people could provide, and his willingness and enthusiasm led us to ask him for help that would not necessarily benefit him. For example, he supported us in carrying out a neighborhood survey where the value was simply in the students gaining experience doing interviews and interacting with low-income residents. He and we both knew there would be no data from this survey that could be used in any meaningful way within either the academy or the planning office.
We refer here to chaining as the process of linking together projects that unfold organically, not always in the ways intended. Chaining highlights the importance of longevity in the community, as the methodology of linking together projects fundamentally requires continuity in relationships. Because we have worked in communities for 25 years, we know a lot of history and have many potential network partners.
Our capacity to turn our projects into research and to chain projects together depends on a conceptualization we recently discovered called “slow sociology” (Garey, Hertz, and Nelson 2014). In this approach, the extensiveness and longevity of our local contacts makes available to us the richness and texture of ethnographic data collection even though we generally lack the focused immersion and structured field notes and systematic data collection that most ethnographers carry out over a short period of time. The Susquehanna Institute as a virtual organization is an experiment in slow sociology, some outcomes of which are discussed in the case studies below.
By taking a slow sociology approach to knowing our region, and to being known by members of it, we have accepted the cultural norms of a place where longevity is a proxy for trustworthiness. In this context and with our intellectual orientation, we were presented with the opportunity to carry out an applied evaluation project for a local school district. We present the case as an example of how virtual organizations like the Susquehanna Institute facilitate chaining projects and assets exchange. The slow sociology approach to building and perpetuating virtual organizations is also a useful educational strategy for students as it provides a context within which they can learn about both a specific place and how to use ethnographic field methodologies.
An Example of Chaining: The BRSD Health Needs Assessment and the Central Susquehanna Affordable Care Act Project
Project: The BRSD Health Needs Assessment
The BRSD Project materialized for the same reason that many other Susquehanna Institute opportunities have arisen. The prior relationship we had developed with the community foundation director led him to suggest us to help the school district. The community foundation is a key associational actor in the constellation of local nonprofits, as it is a central funding institution with a mission to provide financial support to a range of social programs in the areas of community development, health, and education within and around Summerville. The community foundation relates to specific fields of community problems and through the flow of resources, it helps projects to mature, addressing problems that may not have been recognized or where responses might not have been fully developed before. This, in turn, builds and supports organizations that act as agents in the community to remediate a given social problem. For the current project, the community organization is a school district, and the community foundation provided funding support for the remodeling of a high school football stadium. The district superintendent, Harry Straub, was required by the foundation to have an assessment study completed. When he asked the foundation director how to complete this task, he was given our contact information.
Project background and orientation
Once Superintendent Straub contracted us to undertake a community impact assessment of the BRSD Community Wellness and Athletic Center, we developed a multiple methods research approach (Brewer and Hunter 1989). In a previous partnership, we had carried out a regional health needs assessment (a follow-up project to the Armstrong County Social Services Needs Assessment) with a detailed questionnaire and 3,300 respondents that included 180 respondents from the school district area. Despite the extensiveness of that survey, the data had not been analyzed. Students, working on the BRSD assessment, cleaned and analyzed these data. Other teams of students carried out interviews with key informants, mapping the social infrastructure and assets of the community, and physically mapping local topography and exercise opportunities. This work produced an inventory of community health programming and health needs. Thanks to our history of data-oriented projects, we benefited from longitudinal continuity in the collection, analysis, and management of data. This allowed us to build upon previous work for the BRSD assessment, thereby producing a needs assessment utilizing a slow sociology approach of data accumulation and sensitivity to community dynamics.
The question of why the BRSD would develop a community wellness center is answered in part by understanding the vision that Superintendent Straub had for the social and community role the school can play in the rural area occupied by the district. In contemporary studies of rural society in America, schools are recognized as being central institutions in rural communities (Brown and Schafft 2011). At the same time, community support for school taxes is problematic. Charter schools and conservative political support for privatization options also made Superintendent Straub worry.
The BRSD is a specific type of rural place, in that it does not contain a population center that functions as a hub for social services and community life. For many years, Straub had followed a plan to build new school facilities in a way meant to draw local residents to the facility and to encourage identification with the local community. One thing that interested us about Straub’s thinking is the way it maps onto theories with which we have worked, having to do with the symbolic construction of community (Hunter 1974; Milofsky 2008b) and particularly to an idea first articulated by Morris Janowitz (1952) called the “community of limited liability” (Greer 1962; Hunter and Suttles 1972; Milofsky 1997).
The term limited liability has to do with the notion that busy working people who are oriented in their personal lives to a large geographical area (a city in Janowitz’s [1952] case, but the whole river valley in our own) are reluctant to contribute time and energy to community activities unless they think specific personal benefits will result from their efforts. They want to limit their social liability or obligations, and thus, they are not likely to give time and resources to something vaguely defined as “the community.” Yet, in society, we see people make contributions all of the time to more specific aspects of the community without any specific returns being provided. People follow the logic of the “gift relationship,” where their gift of time and energy will result in them having some type of meaningful interaction or experience in return (Titmuss 1972).
This is possible, Janowitz (1952) argued, because self-interested firms such as businesses, community churches, and downtown associations create civic events and other activities that residents value. Residents value these events because they make them feel like they are part of a community with definite boundaries and a strong sense of fellowship. At the beginning, these sentiments are somewhat artificial as they are just a construction of the efforts by businesses and other narrowly self-interested actors to encourage residents to feel a sense of community. But, over time, there is a buildup of activities, events, and organizations that makes community residents believe ever more strongly in the symbolism of their own community. What starts off as a somewhat manipulative and cynical effort by self-interested actors becomes a reality as residents incorporate affiliation with their local community into their personal identities.
The BRSD Wellness Center project, the goals of which contain a broad understanding of community health, is fundamentally an attempt by the superintendent and the school district to build community in the district. Superintendent Straub explained to us that over 30 years, the district had followed a building plan where all of the buildings were located on one site, and where school buildings were designed so that they could be used by the community without disrupting instruction. The middle school, for example, has art rooms that were on a separate wing with doors to the outside, so community people can use the rooms even if teaching children is going on in other wings of the building. In this way, he hopes that the school buildings will provide sites where processes of community could be enacted. Straub also talked about the importance of sports for building community identity, and he hoped that renovated sports fields that were open to residents would help further build community, both by strengthening sports team identification and by giving residents facilities that they would use and value.
Project methodology
We designed our needs assessment research to produce a case study to illustrate the community of limited liability process at work. We also wanted to know if community members understood the nature of the remodeling and expansion efforts in terms of Straub’s theory; that is, if community attachment corresponds to physical activity and if this attachment, in turn, would generate positive physical, emotional, and behavioral health outcomes.
Two student research assistants and the two faculty advisors created a list of possible interviewees. We started with a list of individuals identified by Superintendent Straub as those who had donated money to support the creation of the facility. To his list, we added a selection of health leaders in the region. These were individuals who direct nonprofits in the district, donors, and the employee wellness program coordinators of major employers in the district. Our research team completed interviews with these community members and leaders, completed field notes about these interviews, and provided audio transcripts of the interviews. We focused our questions on understandings of both individual health choices and the health field in the community. The data were then analyzed to identify key themes across individuals of different social positions within the district, to generate a clearer understanding about perceptions of health that existed in the community.
We discovered that interviewees lacked a strong understanding of how to speak about health. Specifically, it did not appear that residents of the district had a rich health vocabulary. We were surprised that this lack of community-level health conceptualization was shared by the majority of the health care providers with whom we spoke, most of whom lacked a theory of how the community would function as a whole to improve health outcomes. This stands in contrast to the perspective offered to us by Superintendent Straub, who thought that by creating new attachments to the school district focused on exercise, he could advance a community agenda related to improving health and well-being.
Chaining into the Central Susquehanna Affordable Care Act Project
One member of the community of professional service providers who did not fit the general characterization of respondents as lacking a perspective on community health is Sara Field. She is the executive director of the Free Clinic in a town across the river from Summerville, within the boundaries of the BRSD. One of us had met Sara when she was part of a debriefing focus group for the Armstrong County Social Services Needs Assessment. We met again to talk about the BRSD assessment, and we were led through a nuanced and complex explanation of health in the community, and how local agencies did and did not see the problems at a more than individual level. As our relationship with Sara further developed, we began working with her to develop a program for helping under- and uninsured members of the region learn about the opportunities provided to them through the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Sara informed us during our initial interview (in May 2013) that there was an impending crisis of enrollment and underfunding for public education that would make it difficult to implement the ACA in the valley, once insurance enrollment began in fall 2013. We did not even have this problem on our radar at that point, and we began to investigate Sara’s claims. We did a search and realized that no organizations within a 150-mile radius would be engaged as Navigator organizations with education or implementation about ACA. We then began to meet together informally with members of the Susquehanna Institute and Sara to determine how and if we could create a participatory research and educational program that used students from our university to educate, enroll, and evaluate our region with respect to the health insurance marketplace. We received training from an advocacy organization at the state level about the nuances of the ACA and began to build out another informal, loose organization of undergraduates, faculty, and community members.
By March 2014, the Central Susquehanna Affordable Care Act Project had an associational structure that included 4 faculty members, 20 volunteer students from our university, and 6 community volunteers with various types of relevant expertise. Our 4 faculty members and 15 of the students had passed the federal training exam to volunteer as Certified Assistance Counselors (CACs), and these people staffed three drop-in centers, each open for three hours per week to help area residents sign up for insurance. We also recruited 3 faculty members from the nearby state university with whom we had worked in the past to be trained as CACs and to set up their own sign-up centers. Six of their students joined them in being trained as CACs and helping with the sign-up process.
While the enrollment period ended in March, six students stayed on campus during the summer to do follow-up interviews with people who had signed up for insurance and to interview social service agency leaders to learn about their orientation toward the Affordable Care Act. A Navigator organization in Philadelphia asked if we would join their application to continue funding for next year, with us taking the lead in eight counties located in our rural part of the Commonwealth. In other words, the ACA project continued to evolve and has now chained to a statewide organization that will allow for further projects to emerge as need and resources permit.
Case Analysis: Slow Sociology in Action . . . Slowly
Chaining and virtual organizations are concepts that provide a general framework for understanding our process for developing and carrying out community learning and applied research. In most of our projects, we also have specific conceptual and data collection goals. As we have said, what caught our eye in the BRSD project was Superintendent Straub’s strategic understanding of how he could improve community support for his school district, which fit Janowitz’s (1952) argument about the community of limited liability.
In the two case studies reported here, we were particularly interested in the social conditions that would make the community of limited liability a useful and strategically effective option for an organization. We found that whereas building a community of limited liability is a plausible approach for the BRSD, it did not help us to understand the Volunteers in Medicine Free Clinic (run by Sara Field) or the ACA project. The contrast helps us to better understand where and how the community of limited liability theory is applicable to understanding social relationships and networks.
We analyze this chained set of projects as a demonstration of how slow sociological research that is place-based and oriented toward relationship-building can both elucidate sociological theory and facilitate meaningful public sociology in a distinctive manner. Our two project cases must be seen and understood as being interconnected and related, both to each other and to the projects that came before (and that will come after). The BRSD Health Needs Assessment would not have happened without the blighted neighborhood study, and the ACA project would not have happened without the BRSD interviews. A bit of serendipity is enhanced by our commitment to public sociology. Interviews such as those we carried out for the BRSD study are both about collecting data and about building relationships. We always strive to be strategic and to keep our minds open to ways that our resources as academic professionals can dovetail with the assets our community partners have as professionals and lay residents.
Goals of the Projects
We had three objectives in carrying out the two projects we have described. First, we wanted to provide undergraduate students with meaningful educational opportunities. Second, we wanted to be active community members making university resources available in a public way. Third, we wanted to generate rigorous sociological theory and to do meaningful research. With the BRSD project, we could assume the role of observers carrying out research using conventional sociological methods. With the ACA project, we were participants, and research goals were emergent. We could not identify clear theories and only gradually did we develop a larger, book-length research plan.
Understanding the Cases
Superintendent Straub advocated for the problem of obesity and cardiovascular health in his district. By doing so, he took problems that had been latent and made them explicit in a new context. For him, the context was ostensibly the remodeling of a high school football stadium. He also views the school as a community agent, and feels a commitment to improving the quality of life among his constituents. In addition, he may have material and self-focused motives, since the attractiveness of a school district is often associated with the quality of the sports teams and facilities offered by the school.
Superintendent Straub has been actively upgrading the physical infrastructure of the district over the past 10 years, as he has been centralizing the school district buildings on a single piece of property through building a new middle school and elementary school at the site of the high school. As he worked in his district to raise money for the track and football stadium from organizations and individuals, rather than through requesting a tax increase, he activated the symbolic attachments he inherited and worked to establish between the community and the school. He demonstrated a savvy understanding of individual and organizational motives by using these commitments to raise funds for his personal vision of a remodeled football stadium and public track.
Sara Field also has a personal vision that guides her work with the Free Clinic and led her to create a new project focused on the ACA project and insurance provision for local residents. She had a much more difficult time attracting resources than did Superintendent Straub. Our theory explains this difference by recognizing that there have not been community-level organizational actors working out of their self-interest to create a community attachment to the uninsured.
Sara’s process of creating a solution to the individual-level problem of the uninsured is, in part, to begin to work to activate the community agencies that might be able to make the conceptual leap to supporting our project. However, efforts to reach out to the United Way and to the community foundation that provided financial support for the BRSD project have proven to be unsuccessful. We have been told by the leaders of these organizations that their reluctance comes from concerns about how support will be perceived by other residents and financial supporters due to the politicized nature of the ACA. Sara, then, has to face a different social climate than Harry because the social issue she has identified, even though it is in the same field (health) of community problems, lacks a mechanism by which powerful (resource-rich) members of the local nonprofit ecology can gain symbolic value through engagement with the ACA project.
In these two examples, we see a similar type of network action but different outcomes, in part because of differences by varied success with implementing and leveraging a community of limited liability. The superintendent, due to the status of the institution he runs, the salience of the social problems he had identified, and the power of the symbolic attachments his organizing activated, did not need an entity such as the Susquehanna Institute to provide him with support or to function as a partner. What he needed was a collection of faculty members to complete a task (assessment) that was predefined and in alignment with his goals.
Sara, on the other hand, is operating on the edges of the nonprofit universe in the rural district and lacks the clout, both institutionally and symbolically, to activate the community of limited liability mechanisms for overcoming the collective action problem. In this situation, Sara had to address her desire to increase local capacity for enabling enrollment in insurance through the ACA with partnerships between actors willing to join her cause. She was not simply activating attachments to the symbol of the school or to the problem of obesity, as Harry was; she was building a virtual organization.
The relationships we formed with Harry and Sara represent two distinctive models of how university members, both students and faculty, can be connected to applied research that is motivated by a twin desire for the creation of educational opportunities and for the use of sociological expertise in service of addressing local community issues. With Harry, we were connected as consultants through a virtual organization, and we designed an evaluation research project that was mixed-methods and able to include students with varying skills and interests. We built a relationship with him through the prior relationship we had with a local organization, and we expect that our relationship with Harry will continue in discreet ways in the future. For example, 3 years in the future when another round of evaluation will be required, we expect that he will be in contact.
With Sara, we became and are partners in a loose and ever-changing complex virtual organization that provides education, enrollment, and evaluation of the ACA for an eight-county region. Students, faculty, staff, community leaders, and community members are equally engaged with conceptualizing and implementing the multiple strands of the project. Although this leads to a range of logistical complexities, the trust that has been steadily and slowly built over the project and that was inherited from prior work enables the virtual form to work and function. In addition, this organizational form enables us to integrate new students and community members rapidly and in ways that fit the specific goals each individual has with being a participant.
Conclusion
The strength of the virtual organizational form is it can generate self-interest from actors in the generation of projects that exist at the margins of the priorities of other, more formal organizations. By existing on the boundaries and spaces between other institutions, the Susquehanna Institute is able to provoke the creative social problem identification that is often risky for established institutional actors.
The central driving mechanism of the system is that it is a resource exchange. The resource exchange is central because people (faculty, students, city managers, organization leaders, citizens) will only participate if they find an activity benefits them in meaningful ways. By the same token, partners only want to work with others in the system if their partners have excess resources to offer that participants need. It has functioned as a system without free riders, in part because none of the benefits could be generated without the contributions of various types of assets, whether financial, involving expertise, or rooted in local knowledge. Once people discover benefits in a partnership, they view it as having value, and it becomes easier to reactivate the relationships. This also generates a desire among people to invent new ideas about how partnerships may be developed. Successful projects lead to trust, enjoyment of shared company, and an appreciation that these sharing systems have a magic to them that is fun to see at work.
A dynamic develops where one project leads, or chains, to another as people get new ideas for projects, recruit new partners, and put network relationships together in new ways. People in the system understand that it works because of the whole, not because of the discreet projects. This web is usually opaque or nearly invisible to people who are not at least somewhat involved. To outsiders, the specific actions are low profile, not very profitable, and not very exciting. To insiders, the dynamic is vibrant, powerful, and productive. Our theory is that the clouds of half-connections and partial networks that are held by the members and lost to the outsider create the insider/outsider dynamic. These partial networks function in our region as weak ties across organizations, and because of the dispersed nature of people and resources in our rural area, networks of weak ties create virtual organizations (Granovetter 1973).
The Susquehanna Institute can be a model organizational form for members of university communities interested in providing participatory research opportunities for students. As a virtual organization, it functions as a substrate from which projects and needs materialize in the midst of busy jobs and schedules. It is in the collection of informal relationships that these projects have arisen, and it is important to recognize that these networks can sometimes be more than simply networks. By doing sociology slowly, we can illuminate social processes while connecting students to unique applied research opportunities.
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(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.