Entrepreneurial Social Capital And Social Networks In The Context Of Industrial Clusters Research

From 1990s, researchers in entrepreneurship field paid more and more energy on studying the context and process issues that entrepreneurial activities occurs . The socially perspective in entrepreneurship research was aroused more and more attention than ever. Scholars begin to use social capital and social network theory in analyzing entrepreneurial phenomena and have achieved many useful results. But after reviewing all the past articles in this field, we can find it lacks of core theories in social capital and social network viewpoints of analysiing, it neglected the social cultural environment context that social capital and social network occured. So in this paper, based on the previous related researches in this field, it will deeply investigate the structural dimension of entrepreneurial social capital and the process mechanism of how it can influence entrepreneurial performance, as well as the influence factors and dynamic characters of social network of entrepreneurs under domestic industry cluster context.In study 1, in order to identify the key characteristic of entrepreneurial social capital under Chinese culture context, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 entrepreneurs with different entrepreneurial stage ,industry and size. Based on first hand information, four key dimensions of entrepreneurial social capital we abstracted by coding techniques of content analysis, these are social network, trust relationship, shared cognition, and resource support. At the same time, it using 245 qualified samples to verify the structure of entrepreneurial social capital, the result shows that four dimension structure of entrepreneurial social capital fit quite well in exploration and confirmative factor analysis, and it significantly influence the entrepreneurial performance, the results in this study also shows that the strength of four dimensions in entrepreneurial social capital changes in different entrepreneurial stages, and also in different individual and organizational context.Study 2 investigate how the entrepreneur's social network structure changes in different entrepreneurial stages. By using 146 entrepreneurs as research samples in 7 typical domestic industry clusters, we discuss how 8 main social network variables changes under different entrepreneurial stages, such as size of social network, time spent on developing social network, time spent on sustaining social network, the percentage of family members in social network, the density of social network, the status heterogeneity of social network, the region heterogeneity of social network, the occupation heterogeneity of social network. The result shows that there are significant difference between those variables in different entrepreneurial stages.In study3, based on the 146 qualified samples from 7 domestic industry cluster, the key factors that will affect the process entrepreneur build their social network will tested by using action theory, need for achievement theory and entrepreneurial social skill viewpoint. In this study, we consider entrepreneur's sex, education, age, industry and whether parents are entrepreneurs or not as control variables. By using hierarchical regression analysis and ANOVA method, it reveals that entrepreneur's personal initiative(PI),social skill and degree of need for achievement significantly influence the size and intensity of entrepreneur's social network, and entrepreneur's internal locus of control significantly influence the size of network while no effects on intense of network. Also, we find extroversion character of entrepreneur's personality have no effect neither on network's size nor intensity.Based on the previous 3 studies, in study 4, we investigate the process mechanism of how entrepreneurial social capital effect entrepreneurial performance by using 186 entrepreneur in 7 domestic industry cluster as study sample, we suggest and test the mediator or moderate effect of variables such as entrepreneurial self-efficacy , entrepreneurial environment of industry cluster, entrepreneur's social skill in the relationship between entrepreneurial social capital and entrepreneurial performance. The result indicates that entrepreneurial environment of industry cluster significantly influence the formation of entrepreneurial social capital, entrepreneurial self-efficacy have full moderate effect on the relationship between network structure and share cognitive dimensions of entrepreneurial social capital and entrepreneurial growth performance, and it have part moderate effect on the relationship between trust relationship and resource support dimensions of entrepreneurial social capital and entrepreneurial growth performance, it also find that entrepreneur's social skill have significantly mediator effect on the relationship between network structure , trust relationship and share cognitive dimensions of entrepreneurial social capital and entrepreneurial growth performance, entrepreneurial stage have mediator effect on the relationship between four dimensions of entrepreneurial social capital and entrepreneurial growth performance, while the size of entrepreneurial enterprise have mediator effect on the relationship between network structure , trust relationship and share cognitive dimensions of entrepreneurial social capital and entrepreneurial growth performance.Finally, the main conclusion of this paper were summarized. The theoretical progresses and practical implications of the present study were discussed, as well as the limitation of this study and the directions for future research.