Social Capital and Entrepreneurship: A Schema and Research Agenda

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue considers past and current research on "Social Capital and Entrepreneurship" to develop a schema and an associated research agenda. With the general goal of establishing social capital as a foundational theory of entrepreneurship, we discuss how future research can utilize social capital perspectives across levels of analysis and contexts to explain a wide variety of entrepreneurship phenomena.

Being an entrepreneur: emergence and structuring of two immigrant entrepreneur groups

“…We will thus focus on how network structure (the pattern of relationship) and network content (the resource access they provide) affect the entrepreneurial process (Slotte-Kock and Coviello 2010, 31; e.g., Anderson and Jack 2002;Smith-Doerr and Powell 2005;Klyver and Foley 2012). This is consistent with the idea of going beyond a schematic interpretation of the relationship between social structures and economic outcomes, which handle relational structures as a lubricant or, conversely, as a glue that inhibits "break-out" strategies for immigrant entrepreneurs (Anderson and Jack 2002;Cope, Jack and Rose 2007;Gedajlovic et al 2013). In starting from specific case studies, the goal is to construct analytical models of immigrant entrepreneurship having "partial and local" validity (Boudon 1991), as the aggregate outcome of individual actions taking place in relational structures that have specific morphological features, facilitate the spread of particular resources, and are situated in a setting with its own specific opportunity structure.…”

Levels of Multiplexity in Entrepreneur’s Networks: Implications for Dynamism and Value Creation

“…The social capital literature also integrates network structure, tie strength and content (e.g., Batjargal, 2003;Gedajlovic et al, 2013), but only in a manner that aims at assessing the aggregate available social capital, not its configuration as a social system with interdependent parts. While combining network structure and tie strength is increasingly popular (e.g., Patel & Terjesen, 2011 is an excellent example), tie strength is a construct that is entirely different from multiplexity (this difference is discussed in greater detail in the Relational Multiplexity section).…”

“…As a result of a more precise conceptualization, research on entrepreneurial networks can investigate how entrepreneurial networks evolve and are leverage to create value at a level of detail usually reserved for systems dynamics models (akin to Siggelkow, 2002, but inclusive of relationship partners). Such precision would help advance research beyond aggregated descriptors such as social capital (e.g., Gedajlovic et al, 2013), structural efficiency (Baum et al, 2000), or relational mix (Lechner et al, 2006).…”

“…Without such an integrated approach, much network research risks being "unrealistic" (ibid., p. 216). For instance, by not fully considering multiplexity within or across relationships, we risk significant assumptions about how much endogeneity entrepreneurs have over their network (Stuart & Sorenson, 2007), and about whether social capital is simply the sum of available resources (Gedajlovic et al, 2013). Relationships evolve at very different rates, for different reasons, and cannot readily be aggregated or summed.…”

Connecting the Dots for Social Value: A Review on Social Networks and Social Entrepreneurship

“…Among the theories available to elaborate upon, our contribution here is to show how the sociology of social networks is of particular interest in explaining the emergence of social entrepreneurship across different levels of analysis. Indeed, while there have already been several calls for research on social networks in the context of social entrepreneurship (Haugh 2005;Mair and Marti 2006;Certo and Miller 2008;Short, Moss, and Lumpkin 2009;Gedajlovic et al 2013;Busch 2014), these calls have only been answered very partially. Hence, based on the use of social network theory in the conventional entrepreneurship literature, this article examines how this theoretical body could be exploited in order to explain the emergence of social entrepreneurship.…”