Who is influential in your community?
Conn Carroll
Can you name a single person who lives in your community that you believe is influential?
If not, don’t feel too bad. Most people can’t, either. Prompted by the survey question, “Thinking about the community where you live, who would you say is the most influential person in your community?”, just 25% were able to cough up a name, and even then, the person named was usually a government official who held statewide or federal office, not someone who actually lived in the respondent’s community.
It wasn’t always this way.
When social scientists conducted similar research in the 1950s, the results were very different. In 1956, researchers asked small-town residents to identify who they thought was “generally most influential in the community.” More than two-thirds of respondents were able to come up with a name. And the names they came up with were much different than the ones people chose now.
In the 1950s, local business leaders were identified as being the most influential people in a community, not statewide and national politicians. The authors of the new study looking at who people think are influential today blame the globalization of firms and firm ownership for the fact that few people can now identify a local business leader.
“This restructuring drastically reduced the involvement of local business leaders in their community,” Joshua Hochberg and Eitan Hersh write. “Local companies were transformed into branches of multinational corporations. Their leadership ranks became composed of managers tied to the company, not the community.”
The authors also blame the nationalization of media consumption. People used to watch the local news and read the local newspaper. Now they follow only national stories on national cable news networks and global social media platforms.
Surprisingly, homeownership had no correlation with the ability to identify local leaders, nor did church attendance or gender. Respondents who lived in cities were slightly more likely to identify local leaders than those in the suburbs, but the big differences were between those who voted and those who were more active on social media. If you vote and follow local news on Twitter, you probably know who is influential in your community.
Large multinational corporations are assuredly more efficient at delivering consumers lower prices, but maybe we have also paid another price in losing the sense of community fostered by smaller, locally owned businesses.