After a few years out of the workforce to care for his youngest son, Klaus Thorsen spruced up his LinkedIn profile. Not that un­usual, you may think. After all, the careers networking site has more than 330m registered users. Except that Mr Thorsen is a north London carpenter hoping to find contacts and employment on a site where job titles such as “builder” are more typically used to describe someone who creates online communities than a construction worker.
为了照顾最小的儿子，克劳斯•索尔森(Klaus Thorsen)几年没有工作，之后他把自己领英(LinkedIn)上的简历润色了一下。你可能会想，这没什么特别的。毕竟，这个职业交流网站拥有逾3.3亿个注册用户。除了一点，在伦敦北部做木匠的索尔森想在这个网站找份合同，而在这里像“builder”（建筑工，或网络工程师——译者注）的岗位名称更常用来描述创办网上社区的人，而不是建筑工人。
Mr Thorsen admits he would never have joined LinkedIn if it were not for his partner, Karen Fugle, an executive coach to architects. “If you’re not in the corporate world it’s a big step, [it’s] baffling,” she says. That is not to say Mr Thorsen does not use technology; he is an enthusiastic Twitter user, deploying it to keep up with industry news and finds work through referrals from local websites such as Streetlife.com, a neighbourhood social network.
索尔森承认，如果不是他的伴侣凯伦•富格勒(Karen Fugle)的话，他永远不会加入领英。富格勒是一名面向建筑师的高管教练，她称，“如果你没在企业的圈子里，这真的是一大步，（这）令人困惑。”这并不是说索尔森不会使用高科技；他是Twitter的活跃用户，利用这个社交媒体网站关注行业新闻，并通过Streetlife.com（一家社区社交网站）之类的当地网站的转介找工作。
If LinkedIn has its way, however, more people like Mr Thorsen will bec­ome members of the site — without nudges from executive coaches — and ex­pand the numbers beyond the throngs of accountants, lawyers and marketers already signed up, to include delivery drivers, waiters and joiners.
不过，如果领英的新尝试取得成功，就会有更多像索尔森一样的人成为其会员——不需要高管教练来劝说——使其会员群体超出注册会计师、律师和市场销售人员，扩大至纳入送货司机、服务员和木匠。
Allen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn, wants the site to shed its elitist image as an exclusive club for knowledge workers. LinkedIn last year bought Bright, a US job site that uses a scoring mechanism to match job hunters with em-ployers. The acquisition brought jobs to the site from sectors beyond LinkedIn’s traditional white-collar heartland.
领英的共同创始人艾伦•布鲁(Allen Blue)希望该网站能摆脱精英形象，不再只是为知识型员工打造的专属俱乐部。去年，领英收购了美国求职网站Bright，后者利用一种评分机制来撮合求职者与雇主。此次收购给领英带来了其传统白领核心外其他行业的求职者。
“Now if you do a job search, there are lots of possibilities,” says Mr Blue. “There’s a growing number of blue-collar workers on the site.”
“现在如果你想求职，这里有更多可能性，”布鲁称，“在领英找工作的蓝领工人越来越多。”
The company certainly talks big. There are billions of workers in the world, says Mr Blue, and LinkedIn has ambitions to sign up every single one of them. “We consider all of these [as] people we can deliver value to,” says Mr Blue. Moreover, data compiled from LinkedIn members’ profiles could, for example, help employers plan where to build a factory or distribution centre based on the local labour force’s skills, he argues.
领英显然豪情万丈。布鲁称，世界上有数十亿的工人，领英的雄心是让他们每一个人都成为注册会员。“我们把他们所有人都视为我们能传递价值的对象，”布鲁称。此外，他认为，从领英会员简历编制出的数据也有作用，比如，可以帮助雇主根据当地的劳动力技能，计划在哪里建设工厂或配送中心。
LinkedIn hopes to create the world’s first “economic graph”, its version of Facebook’s “social graph”, coined to describe its networks of friends. As Jeff Weiner, the chief executive, has explained: “We want to digitally map the global economy, identifying the connections between people, jobs, skills, companies and professional knowledge — and spot in real-time the trends pointing to economic opportunities.”
领英希望打造全世界首张“经济图谱”，即领英版的Facebook“社交图谱”，后者描述朋友关系网。正如领英首席执行官谢韦纳(Jeff Weiner)所解释的：“我们希望数字化地绘制全球经济地图，识别人、职位、技能、企业和专业知识之间的联系——并实时发现指向经济机会的趋势。”
While LinkedIn is, in Mr Blue’s words, “professionally paranoid” about Facebook’s plans to create a professional networking channel, called Facebook at Work, he believes users prefer to keep personal and work lives separate.
尽管用布鲁的话来说，领英对于Facebook计划打造的职业人脉渠道Facebook at Work感到“职业恐慌”，但他认为，用户更喜欢把个人生活和工作分隔开来。
Mark Perry, reader in computer
布鲁内尔大学(Brunel University)计算机科技教授马克•佩里(Mark Perry)称，科技公司的发展有一个模式，领英也不例外。“受过高等教育的高收入者是初期对象。他们对企业是有利可图的。科技公司吸引低收入者的动力不那么足——直到早期采用者已转向其他新鲜的东西。”
science at Brunel University, says there is a pattern in tech companies’ development, shared by Linked­In. “Educated higher earners are targeted first. They are lucrative for companies. There is less incentive to get those that are lower earners until the early adopter market has moved on to something else.”
佩里称，问题在于硅谷精英往往不那么了解蓝领工人，他们倾向于为像自己一样的群体开发产品和服务。
The problem, he says, is that people in Silicon Valley tend to know less about blue-collar workers, and they dev­elop products and services for people like them.
尽管如此，佩里相信，领英拥有一个扩大覆盖面的良好机会，原因在于就业的个人主义本质，一些社会学家认为这一本质导致“无保障无产阶级”(precariat)的出现，这一工人群体的特点在于极度没有安全感：“劳工市场的发展方向是零工时合同以及工会成员减少，这意味着人们将更多地利用科技来创建社交网络。”
Nonetheless, he believes Linked­In has a good chance of extending its reach because of the individualistic nature of employment, which some sociologists say has led to the emergence of the “precariat”, a group of workers characterised by extreme insecurity: “The direction of travel in the labour market is zero-hours contracts, [and] declining union membership, which means people will increasingly use technology to create a social network.”
招聘咨询机构Reed的主席詹姆斯•里德(James Reed)赞同这个观点。“就业市场的重点在于灵活性。人们过去希望在雇主那里得到培训。现在他们自己培训。一切都成了‘自我公司’。”
James Reed, chairman of Reed, the recruitment consultancy, agrees. “The jobs market is focused on flexibility. People used to expect training from their employer. Now they do it themselves. It’s all about ‘Me Plc’.”
智能手机正使科技（特别是社交媒体）更便于那些不在常规办公室上班的工人使用。荷兰足球运动员德米•德泽乌(Demy de Zeeuw)近期在领英上登广告寻找新东家。
Smartphones are making technology, social media in particular, more accessible to those workers not based in a conventional office. Dutch footballer Demy de Zeeuw rec­ently advertised for a new club on LinkdedIn.
连锁餐厅——比萨马上诺(PizzaExpress)的人力资源总监阿曼达•安德伍德(Amanda Underwood)对使用领英招聘餐厅员工很乐观。她表示，尽管领英并非餐饮行业进行招聘的传统渠道，但是“通过鼓励我们的餐厅团队使用领英，他们自己的网络将形成势头，成为一笔宝贵的资产”。
Amanda Underwood, human resources director at PizzaExpress, the restaurant chain, is optimistic about using LinkedIn to recruit restaurant staff. She says that while LinkedIn is not tradit­ionally used for recruitment in the hospitality sector, “by encouraging our restaurant teams to use LinkedIn, their own networks will gather momentum and become a valuable asset”.
也有人对此持怀疑态度。企业人类学家约翰•柯伦(John Curran)观察发现，在领英，人们会觉得自己不得不遵守主流的专业文化。领英创建了其会员要遵守的文化规范，这可能对服务员、水管工或机械工的入会构成障碍。柯伦称，人们的印象是，领英的所有会员都是身穿西装和在办公桌工作的。“如果你无法与这些职业规范契合，你可能不想注册领英。”
Others are doubtful. John Curran, a business anthropologist, observes that LinkedIn is a site where people feel they must conform to the prevailing professional culture. LinkedIn has created cultural norms that members observe, which may prove a barrier to, say, waiters, plumbers or machinists joining. The perception, he says, is that all members are suited and desk-bound. “If you can’t fit into these professional codes, you might not want to join.”
柯伦称，社会学家欧文•戈夫曼(Erving Goffman) 1959年出版的《日常生活中的自我表现》(The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life)一书中阐释的“印象管理”(impression management)，也存在于社交媒体。“你向受众表明你的身份。人们精心打造自己的网络，以表现出自己的成功。”如果有一个你觉得不够级别的人与你相关联，你可能会觉得这“污染你的网络”、玷污你的身份。
“Impression management”, described by sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life, is present in social media, he says. “You convey your identity to an audience. People curate their network to show they are successful.” If someone connects with you whom you deem inferior it could be seen as “polluting your network” and contaminating your identity.
同样，企业策略专家尤安•森普尔(Euan Semple)也怀疑，像英国这种阶级意识分明的国家，是否会接受一个让蓝领和白领交流的职业社交网站。Reed金融、法律和银行部门的业务主管罗伯特•拉塞尔(Robert Russell)利用领英寻找可能的候选人，他担心，如果该网站将所有的工人囊括其中，品牌影响力将被稀释。不过，雇主点评网站Glassdoor的高级总监萨曼塔•朱潘(Samantha Zupan)认为，这些顾虑都不会是问题。