Can Sense of Opportunity Identification Efficacy Play a Mediating Role? Relationship Between Network Embeddedness and Social Entrepreneurial Intention of University Students

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurial activity centering on solving social problems and creating social values, which can effectively alleviate the problems of sustainable development such as an excessive gap between the rich and the poor, a lack of resources and so on, and can resolve the “triple failures” of government, the market and public welfare departments to a certain extent. As the subjective attitude of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial intention can predict a representational incidence rate of entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, aimed at university students, a special group of entrepreneurs, this paper constructs a theoretical framework of “network embeddedness – sense of opportunity identification efficacy – university students’ social entrepreneurial intention” from the perspective of social cognitive theory through 466 pieces of valid survey data, and uses Stata 14 to construct a multiple linear regression model to explore the mechanism of action between the three. The results show that university students’ sense of opportunity identification efficacy can significantly and positively stimulate their social entrepreneurial intention, and the network embeddedness (network scale and network intensity) of entrepreneurs is also significantly and positively correlated with their sense of opportunity identification efficacy; however, via the hierarchical regression model, it was found that the sense of opportunity identification efficacy can only partially mediate the relationship between network embeddedness and university students’ social entrepreneurial intention, which is mainly manifested in the positive correlation between university students’ social entrepreneurial intention and their network scale, and is unrelated to network intensity. This research contributes to enriching the theory of social entrepreneurial intention and guides the strengthening of university students’ social entrepreneurial intention in reality.

Understanding the Impact of Social Capital on Entrepreneurship Performance: The Moderation Effects of Opportunity Recognition and Operational Competency

“…Scholars have studied the relationship between social capital and entrepreneurship and found that the social capital of entrepreneurs facilitates the adoption of entrepreneurial behaviors by entrepreneurs (Wang et al, 2019). For example, Li et al (2021) empirically showed that social capital not only directly promotes farmers' e-commerce adoption but also plays a part in the positive relationship between "prior entrepreneurial experience-farmers' e-commerce adoption behavior" and "prior training experience-farmers' e-commerce adoption behavior. "…”

Unraveling the Role of Empathy and Critical Life Events as Triggers for Social Entrepreneurship

“…However, social entrepreneurs differ from traditional entrepreneurs by having more “social concerns,” a greater sense of moral obligation and a higher degree of empathy ( Miller et al, 2012 ; Bargsted et al, 2013 ; Ruskin et al, 2016 ; Lubberink, 2020 ). Most of the studies report on (nascent) entrepreneurs who have the intention to engage in social (e.g., Saebi et al, 2018 ; Wang et al, 2019 ; Wu et al, 2020 ) or sustainable (e.g., Ploum et al, 2019 ) entrepreneurial activities. More empirical research is needed that concentrates on entrepreneurs who already have started their venture and actually create social value in combination with an economic activity.…”

Entrepreneurial competencies and intentions among students of technical universities

“…Such results correlate with the results of the survey in classical universities. In particular, studies have shown (Wang et al, 2019) that students' sense of opportunity identification efficacy firmly stimulates their entrepreneurial intention. However, according to the results, students of economic specialties at technical universities are more likely to show entrepreneurial intentions than non-economic ones; male students -slightly more often than female students.…”