Social capital and its influence on the internationalisation strategy and process of Chinese SME from the manufacturing industry

From Global Mindset to International Opportunities: The Internationalization of Chinese Smes

“…Further reading of network-related literature provides a mixed set of results as Larson and Starr (1993) pointed to the firm's ability through networking to simultaneously capture the unfolding entrepreneurial process and the evolving social relationships between entrepreneurs and other people. Contrary to this Bai et al (2016) concluded that international networking does not always have a positive impact on firms' financial performance, whereas Rieckmann et al (2019) and Shi et al (2019) pointed to possible underutilisation of available network resources by SMEs in their endeavours to internationalize.…”

“…Recent decades have witnessed tremendous expansion of SMEs globally and thus the international dimensions of entrepreneurship have attracted the attention of researchers (Oviatt & McDougall, 2005;Ruzzier et al, 2006;Evers & O'Gorman, 2011;Korsakienė & Tvaronavičienė, 2012;Olejnik & Swoboda, 2012;Kyvik et al, 2013;Karami & Tang, 2019). There is a notion that firms' operational adaptation to dynamic international environments (also known as internationalization) (Calof & Beamish, 1995), requires from SMEs to be distinctive from large corporations operating in the same industries, because of the willingness and eventually abilities of the former to achieve competitive advantage despite the scarcity of available resources (Rieckmann et al, 2019;Shi et al, 2019). Although the concept of firms internationalization has been studied extensively in the literature, the factors influencing SMEs' operational expansion overseas, processes within the firm and the strategy of meaningful realignment, are still insufficiently researched (Miocevic & Crnjak-Karanovic, 2012;Felício et al, 2016;Buzavaite & Korsakiene, 2019).…”