A Study On Rural Mini-Enterprises Entrepreneurship Based On Farmer Entrepreneurs' Social Capital

The first wave of entrepreneurship took place in the 80s of last century in which farmers are the leading power. But the the wave of entrepreneurship led by farmers didn't completely change their worse living situation in the mass and rural lagging appearances. In later stage of the 90s of last century, issues concerning agriculture became more and more serious, the key step to solve which is to increase farmers' income from a micro level. But Chinese farmers'income increase is faced with a big constraint whenever they stay in traditional agriculture or do work for others in cities.The report of the 17th NPC definitely points out that "we should persevere in practicing acive employment policies, commit guiding principles to drive employment by entrepreneurship, strengthen training about employment and entrepreneurship, encourage finding jobs on their own and self-employment and support establishing small enterprises". Therefore, farmer entrepreneurship maybe becomes one of important ways to solve the problem of farmers' income increase. Farmers use their tiny property to venture and entrepreneurial organization patterns must be rural mini-enterprises (RMS). When farmers venture by RMS, their financial and human capital is relatively in short, but farmers are embedded in special social networks and they can attain ample social capital through utilizing blood relationship, geopolitics and job relationship. Therefore, farmer entrepreneurs' social capital can provide an important support in the entrepreneurship process of RMS. But in fact, academic circle doesn't pay enough theoretical attention to the popular RMS' entrepreneurship phenomenon and few researchers study the entrepreneurship process of RMS from the view of farmers' social capital. The dissertation tries to remedy these defects.The dissertation will clarify and disclose the entrepreneurship process of RMS and the rules in the process from the view of farmers' social capital in order to provide theoretical support and empirical proofs to increase survival ratio of RMS and secondly provide theoretical reference to government's related policies design. To reach this aim, the dissertation manages to answer three questions. Firstly, how does farmer entrepreneurs' social capital impact their opportunity identification? Secondly, how do farmer entrepreneurs manage their social capital dynamically to adapt RMS'survival pursuit? Thirdly, how does the social capital that has been managed by farmer entrepreneurs impact RMS'performance? The specific research contents and conclusions are below.The first section is to make a systematic and profound document review. It reviews documents from three aspects, including social capital's impact on opportunity identification, social capital's dynamical development and the impact of social capital that has been managed by farmer entrepreneurs on RMS' performance, and picks out the relations and rules which have been found, and gives an objective evaluation and points out the shortcomings in previous studies so as to build a good platform for our research.The second section is to expound theoretical bases and define important conceptions. In this section, it states three theoretical bases, including entrepreneurship process theory, social capital theory and resource-based theory. And it also defines the conceptions of RMS, RMS' entrepreneurship, farmer entrepreneurs' social capital and farmer entrepreneurs' opportunity identification.The third section is to answer the question of "how does farmer entrepreneurs' social capital impact farmer entrepreneurs' opportunity identification?" It answers the question from two aspects. First, using multinomial logistic regression (MLR) and based on a large sample's survey data, it explores the predictive ability of farmer entrepreneurs' initial social capital on three opportunity identification types. Results show that the more strong ties, the more likely opportunity recognition is, and the more weak ties, the more likely opportunity creation is, and previous self-employment experience interferes the predictive ability of farmer entrepreneurs' initial social capital. Second, based on the depth interview data about 14 migrant worker-returnees from two villages in Hubei province, it uses grounded method to build a theoretical model----a comparison about force respectively exerted by strong ties and weak ties in migrant worker-returnees' opportunity identification of entrepreneurship, and draws a basic conclusion that the local strong ties have a greater force. Then it points out a phenomenon of nonlocal weak ties' rupture and makes a deep analysis about it by using the conceptions of "social resource" and "trust" in sociology.The forth section is to answer the question of "how do farmer entrepreneurs dynamically manage their social capital to adapt enterprises' survival pursuit?" Using an explorative case study and based on the interview data of 14 farmer entrepreneurs, this section discloses the trend of farmer entrepreneurs' social capital dynamics and the causes behind this trend. Results show that the whole developing trend of farmer entrepreneurs' social capital is that they don't tend to build strong ties, but tend to build weak ties and trust. RMEs' depending on farmers group, high competition among suppliers, limitation of building strong ties and the nature of by-business of farmer entrepreneurship altogether leads them not tending to build strong ties. The reasons why farmer entrepreneurs tend to build weak tie are that they can increase sales and facilitate trade-discussing letting it out of the constraint of close relationship. And the reasons why farmer entrepreneurs tend to build trust with customers include several aspects. First, it is premise of trading; second, it can consolidate costumers group; third, sometimes, it's a key factor for successful trading; last, non-trust creates negative reputation. Rural market's narrowness amplifies the positive or negative effect of relational trust, which makes relational trust is very important for RMEs'survival. Most farmer entrepreneurs also tend to build trust with suppliers because it can do well to mutual problems solution and decrease trading cost and help farmer entrepreneurs attain accurate product information. But high competition among suppliers can slack down farmer entrepreneurs' trend to build trust with them.The fifth section is to answer the question of "how does the social capital that has been managed by farmer entrepreneurs impacts RMS' performance?" Using moderated multiple regression (MMR) and based on a large sample's survey data, it explores the relationship between business networks embeddedness developed dynamically by farmer entrepreneurs and start-ups' performance in RMEs. Results show that strong ties and trust have significantly actively impacts on start-ups'performance in RMEs, but wrong ties don't have. At the same time, opportunity innovativeness don't give a significant direct impact on start-ups' performance, but it moderates the relationship between two variables.The last section is to provide the final implications and research perspectives. The managerial implications include three aspects:first, farmer entrepreneurs should completely use and mobilize their strong ties to venture and improve their living conditions; second, they should strengthen weak ties' building and bring their function of delivering new information into play fully; third, they should focus to foster relational trust and explore the narrow market deeply. Policy implication is that our govenmemt should play the role of "structural hole" to compensate the farmers' deficiency in "information weak ties". To get the target, government maybe should pay attention to two key points. One is proactively seeking information and letting farmer entrepreneurs to access them; another is helping farmer entrepreneurs make sense of them. At the same time, this section also gives the valuable future research directions.