Cooperation - People always say how competitive a career in the performing arts is. I have been to auditions with 500+ dancers all wanting the same job so on first impressions I cannot argue that this isn't so. However, the very nature of networking is seemingly cooperative. A network allows people to connect and work together in order for them to mutually benefit their careers. So when is it necessary to compete and when is it necessary to cooperate as a performer?
When I played the 'Prisoner's Dilemma' game, my first instinct was to compete because its a game is it not? And the idea of a game is to win. However, the idea of this particular game is not only to win but to obtain the highest number of coins. I did win by number of coins but I did not receive many coins all together. Next, I tried cooperating on every turn, this enabled both me and my opponent to gain more coins but it ended in a tie. Therefore, in order to win, a better strategy is to cooperate for as long as possible and then to compete in order to gain more coins than ones opponent. Researcher Robert Axelrod looked, in depth, into competition versus cooperation.
'To my considerable surprise, the winner was the simplest of all the programs submitted, TIT FOR TAT. TIT FOR TAT is merely the strategy of starting with cooperation, and thereafter doing what the other player did on the previous move.' Axelrod .R. (1984)
Axelrod wondered whether, in a real life situation, people would only cooperate if they were going to also gain from the act, 'cooperation based solely on reciprocity seemed possible.' Axelrod .R. (1984)
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a very simple way of looking at how important cooperation is when networking.
Yet, I can see patterns in my own networking forming through this game. Will I get the most out of my network if I choose to constantly compete with those in it? No, of course I won't because people will not want to network with me if I am only out for my own gain and never look to help anyone else. What if I only ever cooperate? I think this would work better because I would be helping others in my network and they will then, one would hope, want to help me through reciprocation like tit-for-tat. But how about cooperating up to a certain point and then competing right at the end? Well, this might work once but is that person you cooperated with, and then used to get ahead, going to want to help you out in the future? My guess is no. Again, this concept of tit-for-tat rears its head.
However, I have often helped out other dancers with no desire to benefit my own career. If they help me out in the future then that would be greatly appreciated but I don't expect pay back. However, this could be my human nature and Axelrod argues that this doesn't come into play here.
'But the present approach is strategic rather than genetic.' Axelrod (1984)
I can see that choices we make while networking often come down to strategy. For example, I don't want to always be the professional who cooperates in place of getting work I want. Yet, I find it unrealistic to completely rule out ones human nature in these matters. Even though I believe I have that 'competitive streak', I am also compassionate. If a friend of mine was a wonderful dancer but terrible at networking I would give them advice. I am not going to think ' I will not gain a thing from this, why should I do it?'. I think for networks to work effectively, people in them need to cooperate but selfless acts and a bit of healthy competition are also necessary.
Affiliation - Unlike Axelrod's ideas on cooperation, affiliation has everything to do with human nature. The term is used to explain our need to engage with other humans in order to fulfil our psychological needs and give us, 'a network of support that will help us when we are in need' Crisp and Turner (2007)
This network is most likely to consist of friends and loved ones, but, do I have a professional network of support? I believe I do because when it comes to times of need within a specific career who is better at understanding than someone who knows where you are coming from and has themselves been through what you are facing. My mum is, no doubt, in my social network of support but she is a high school teacher so she can't understand certain problems I may face in my career. Therefore, I need a network of performers that I am close to so that I have support within my profession. This may also give indication as to why I fell in love with a man in a similar field to myself and why my mum married my father who is also a teacher. Perhaps, subconsciously, we humans sometimes blur the lines between social and professional networks in order to gain the psychological support we need.
Homoeostasis is a principle of affiliation which describes each human's differing levels of need for social interaction. Connor and Rosenblood (1996) suggest this is connected to whether the person is an introvert or an extrovert. I am an extrovert and I like to be social. Yet, I can relate to the idea of homoeostasis, with reference to varying needs of social interaction, because there are times when I want nothing more than to stay in. However, staying in is not always an option when networking needs to be done. There is certainly a difference between going out socially and going out with a view to network, which can be daunting however much of a confident person you are. Networking that is done on-line may satisfy some individuals more than physically putting yourself out there. I know that I feel more confident hiding behind a computer screen than actually, say, meeting a possible employer in person and feeling pressure to impress there and then.
This links to the privacy regulation theory, Altman (1975) which explains that our need for privacy can change within a short space of time (the dialectic principle) and that we try to affiliate to our desired level (optimization principle). This could explain why some people are more comfortable with face-to-face networking than others. Perhaps those people are naturally more open and desire less privacy than others.
There has been research into both biological and cultural explanations as to why we affiliate. I think networking is part of our culture as professional performers. In Hofstede's (1980) research into affiliation in 22 different countries he found that in individualistic cultures people had a lot of social contact and a lot of superficial friendships. My career is individualistic, it is my career I don't share it with anyone else. Therefore, as a dancer it is wise for me to have a large network of performers so that I don't limit myself when it comes to working. Besides, there is often going to be a small level of superficiality when it comes to a working environment because we are there, primarily, to get a job done. Having said that, some of my closest friends in the world are performers because, as I have already said, there is a good level of understanding between us that satisfies our psychological needs.
Social Constructionism: This is the ides that humans construct their own meanings from objects and the world around them. The idea is that nothing has a meaning until a human names it and gives it a purpose. Also, everything is subjective because we are adding to pre-existing knowledge, we do not create anything completely from scratch.
Networks are social constructions. They do not exist without humans attaching meaning and use to them.
'What constructionism claims is that meanings are constructed by human beings as they engage with the world they are interpreting' Crotty, M (2005)
Meaning that as we continually engage in the world we find more and more meaning. Therefore, the more we engage in networking the more value we will seek from it.
This made me think about my professional networks in an entirely different way. From a social contructionists viewpoint, I decide what my network means to me and what I want to gain from it. For example, I network with dancers here in Amsterdam in order to find out about work in Holland. However, some of them want to network with me to find out about work further a field because that is where I have experience. We haven't created our networks from nothing, the concept of a network has been practised by humans for a long long time and was given meaning by humans even then. However, we all shape and mould and construct our own networks to fit our varying needs.
Connectivism: Is a theory on learning which has only become popular in the last two or three decades, due to the invention of the internet and Web 2.0. Connectivism takes us away from traditional learning which is a linear process: teacher/book/web page to student. To a learning network made up of all these factors known as nodes and the student makes sense out of the information each node provides by constructing connecting paths between the information themselves.
It is unrealistic to think that one source (node) will give you all the information you require. If I speak to somebody in my professional network I do not expect they will, for example, give me the name of a company I am interested in working for, plus an email address, plus a telephone number, plus the name of the person in charge of casting and so on. Even if they did I would still want to do some background research for myself on-line. I would have previously thought of the person giving the information as one node and then the internet as the second node. However, where I find this theory interesting is that if each web page is considered a separate node, when I am using the internet, I must be connecting information from multiple nodes in order to gain the necessary knowledge. I feel I have been unaware of how much information I have taken in from different sources and I feel the more nodes I use the more lines of connection I can form and finally the more knowledge I can gain. Therefore, in the future I won't just stop when I think I have acquired what I wanted to know. Instead I will keep looking at information from as many nodes as possible because then I will have more lines of connection to gain understanding from and, most likely, learn something new.
However, one problem I have with this connectivism is its broad definition of nodes. According to the theory web pages, teachers, books and other professionals are all examples of nodes from which a student gathers information. A good teacher is there to help you to improve by correcting you and giving you feedback not just to give you information. I couldn't have learned how to dance say from Youtube. Even through dance tutorial videos I'm not going to learn a fraction of what I did from three years at dance college. So to say the experience one get from reading a web page is the same as the interpersonal engagement of a human being seems, to me, rather ridiculous.
Still, connectivism would suggest that I as an individual make the choice of what nodes I feel are most useful to me. Part of this theory is to be prepared for ever-changing environments and being able to make decisions in this evolving. Recently, I went to Paris to audition for a contract that won't start until April but, before I went, I was offered a month long contract starting immediately. I had to decide which one to do. Having had a bad experience previously working for the company that was offering me an immediate contract I knew the decision I was going to make. Also, knowing that the company in Paris is respectable through people in my network the choice was clear.
'[learning is] a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world' Driscoll (2000)
Therefore, through connectivism we can learn successfully because we are allowing ourselves to adapt to different ideas and changing environments.
Communities of Practice: This concept revolves around the idea of learning in a group rather than individually, in a social and informal manner. 'Situated Learning' Lave and Wegner (1991) refers to how learning can come from situations where a group of people have the the same interests and can therefore learn together from one another to gain a deeper understanding.
My community of practice of professional dancers provides me with knowledge within the working world. In the first year after I left college I learned more about the dance profession than I ever have and possibly ever will do. At college my teachers could teach me how to be a dancer with reference to performance and technique but after that it was the communities of practice I became a part of that taught me how to succeed in a professional environment.
'length is rather variable as individuals go through successive steps at their own pace' Lave and Wegner (1991)
Lave and Wagner are here describing a community of practice of Alcoholics Anonymous, but this notion of the development taking a different amount of time for each individual applies to my community too. Some dancers will take longer than others to find their first job and therefore take longer to become part of a working community of practice. Moreover, I have discovered, these are the best communities of practice to be a part of with reference to furthering ones career because the members get to know one another so well and on a personal level that information is shared freely.
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