Networking

The importance of networking in everyday working life is dramatized in the film Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s showcasing of the fascinating world of financial investment. The main character is Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas), who reigns over an empire of impressive money market monopolies. The stable of people he knows, privileged information he accesses and continuous communication he engages in add up to a networking superstar. Bud (Charlie Sheen) attempts to emulate Gecko both in his competence as a power broker and in the networking skills necessary to guarantee domination in that world.

Networking as a Feature of Contemporary Life

In its exposé of stock market realities Wall Street demonstrates the inescapability of networking as a fixed feature of contemporary working life. Indeed, networking is most frequently associated with job and career environments. But it has evolved as a dimension of everyday life beyond the confines of the workplace. In the busy and segmented urban life of most North Americans, networking is required to find friends and to establish a community of connections. With our nostalgic and idealized notions of relationships, we are apt to suspect networking as too formal and utilitarian for our romantic aspirations. But in the reality of city life, networking becomes the necessary bridge to identify and nurture meaningful relationships. Whether practiced consciously or accidentally, networking is a relational habit for many people.

Networks require a measure of intentionality and civility. Networkers are influential precisely because they know what they want and initiate processes to attain their desires and aspirations. People, called players, who vigorously pursue strategic positioning recognize that in a competitive social setting, civility and a measure of concern for others in networking are crucial for any short-term or long-term gains. Because of the pervasiveness of networking, a moral imagination should be employed to appreciate and assess its contribution to contemporary daily life.

Networking in Organizational Life

The twentieth century has seen the astronomical growth of large institutions. With this organizational trend has come a dramatic increase in professionals to manage and operate these bureaucratic enterprises. Concurrent with these developments has been the globalization of institutional relations in government, business and ecclesiastical sectors (see Global Village). All of these new realities mandate leadership styles that mobilize networking capacities. Networking is the process of creating and maintaining a pattern of informal linkages among individuals and institutions. In a swiftly changing social environment, new and flexible interconnections become necessary. Leaders must be highly skilled in constructing or re-creating the linkages necessary to function effectively (Gardner, p. 62).

The recent proliferation of publications dissecting organizational culture and submitting prescriptions for successful leadership of diverse institutions frequently includes discussions of networking. The near-totalitarian presence of organizational life is the catalyst for this saturation of printed resources to assist leaders and players to operate with confidence. In today’s entrepreneurial and innovative climate, internal networking emerges as a primary ingredient in being productive. The constant moving around of people and processes means that humans rather than formal mechanisms become the principal carriers of information and integrative links between different departments within an organization. Mobility is a key factor as a network-forming vehicle and thus becomes an admission ticket to the power centers. An organization’s opportunity structure—movement to privileged and prestigious positions—is directly related to the power structure (Kanter, p. 164). Networking has become one of the preferred competencies to contribute to a healthy company and to procure advancement possibilities. The wise executive or manager carefully place in strategic positions individuals who are networkers by inclination. This inclusion of networkers enables the establishment of informal cross-boundary working groups that energize the entire corporate culture (Gardner, p. 163).

External networking is also a work of innovative trends in institutional development currently in fashion. The best companies relate even to their competitors (see Competition). Building alliances enhances communication and mutuality. In a cutthroat approach to organizational relations there tend to be losers all the way around. Healthy alliance building produces mutual benefits for each partner and for society as a whole. Leaders must nurture outside networks of allies in the many other segments of society whose cooperation is desired for a significant result (Gardner, p. 104).

Networking and the Spirituality of Daily Life

Networking is an individual and institutional activity. The movement of structures suggests the inevitability of involvement in networks. The globalization and urbanization of contemporary life also mean that institutions are interdependent and are necessarily interfacing as their respective missions and operations pull them into a marketplace of connections. Organizational life is an extension of the created world—part of what is often called the cultural mandate.

God, who is a Trinity, created the world in a relational manner and wired it to be a communicative network. These relational and communicative processes have been distorted and demented as they moved east of Eden. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has brought the possibility of a more complete reconciliation into these processes. It is now possible to network in a manner that is reconciling in its intent and expression.

Networking is one essential dimension of the ministry of reconciliation the apostle Paul speaks of so intently (2 Cor. 5:19). The several implications of the ministry of reconciliation for networking are exemplified in Jesus, mandated by the Creator and empowered by the Spirit. The primary implication is the deliberate communication to the neighbor (see Neighborhood), including the stranger. The love of neighbor and stranger that Jesus demands becomes the starting point for the networking activity associated with our job and civic life. Networking is that public part of our daily life in which we recognize our oneness, our unity, our interdependence on one another. Indeed, we are strangers and likely will remain as such, but we inhabit common space, share resources, convene around mutual opportunities and generally must learn to live and work together. The public drama in which we all are participants reveals a life in which strangers inevitably come into daily contact with others and learn to solve problems together and enrich and enlarge each other’s perspectives. We are all part of a web, linked in a network (Palmer, pp. 19-20).

The church is to be a communion of communions. Jesus has called people together from disparate multicultural environments to be witnesses of the kingdom of God. Networking is a spiritual discipline of the ecumenical church to celebrate our unity in the gospel and affirm the different ministries in the world of the public. Jesus’ vision of a unified and commissioned church mandates a spirituality that includes networking as part of its habit of ecumenism and mission in the world (Marty, p. 79). A spirituality of daily life recognizes the vitality of networking in the discipleship of the Christian and in the public vocation of the church.

» See also: Fellowship

» See also: Friendship

» See also: Organization

References and Resources

W. Baker, Networking Smart (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); J. W. Gardner, On Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1990); R. S. Kanter, The Change Masters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); M. Marty, The Public Church (New York: Crossroad, 1981); P. Palmer, The Company of Strangers (New York: Crossroad, 1981).

—Scott Young