Empirical Study Of The Emergence And Growth Of Rural Tourism Micro-Enterprises From A Perspective Of Family Network Embeddedness

The issue of agriculture,rural areas and farmers is a strategic issue related to the fate of the nation and long-run prosperity of China.The 19th National Congress of CPC put forward the strategy of Rural Revitalization,clearly pointing out that to solve the "three rural issues" as the top priority of the work of the CPC.In recent years,rural tourism has shown significant effects in thriving rural economy,alleviating poverty,and enhancing peasants' living standard.Therefore,governments of all levels in China have chosen the planning and development of rural tourism as an effective way to break the urban-rural dual structure so as to prosper the economy in rural areas.As the "market entity" of rural tourism industry,micro enterprises such as nongjiale and Village Homestay serve as the footstone in the development of the industry.Moreover,the endogenous tourism micro-enterprises that are founded and operated by local rural residents play critical roles in revitalizing rural economy,increasing rural living standard,as well as achieving sustainability in tourism development.It thus can be asserted that the quantity and quality of these endogenous micro-enterprises,to a very large extent,determines the potential of tourism industry in exerting its economic,cultural,environmental,and social benefits to the rural areas.Consequently,investigating the driving forces and the underlying mechanism of rural tourism micro-enterprises' emergence and growth is of great importance both in theory and practice.However,under the background of vigorous development of the industry,there is still relatively little academic research on tourism micro-enterprises.More specifically,a systematic investigation of how these tourism micro-enterprises emerge,develop,and grow has not yet been adequately addressed in the literature.With the aim of filling this research gap,the present dissertation adopted a theoretical perspective of "family network embeddedness",and explored the underlying mechanism and critical determinants of tourism micro-enterprises' emergence and growth in a more systematic way.By doing so,we tried to provide a knowledge base for local governments to better implement the rural tourism strategy.As a typical "family mode of production",rural tourism micro-enterprises such as nongjiale and Village Homestay have the prominent characteristics of family operation and family involvement.A kinship social network,which is composed by the entrepreneurs' family members and relatives,plays a vital role in the emergence and growth of these micro-enterprises.The kinship network is a special kind of network mainly composed by "strong ties".In accordance with the characteristics of high trust,commitment,reciprocity of the strong ties between the members,the kinship network is posited to have especially positive effects in promoting the emergence and growth of rural tourism micro-enterprises;and its characteristics of high cohesion,redundancy and homogeneity make the kinship network may also exert reverse effects regarding development and growth of rural tourism micro-enterprises.Based on this theoretical speculation,this dissertation took a kinship network embeddedness perspective,analyzing and testing the differentiated effects of kinship social network on formation,operation and growth of rural tourism micro-enterprises.Through the design and conduct of four progressive sub-studies,the following four main conclusions were achieved in this dissertation:(1)The kinship social network plays a critical role in promoting the formation of rural tourism micro enterprises.More specifically,three dimensions of kinship network,namely network structure,network relationship,and network cognition were all verified to be positively related to peasants'intention to start-up a tourism micro-enterprise.And the network relationship,which refers to the intimacy of the kinship members,showed the strongest power in predicting the peasants,entrepreneurial intention in rural tourism.Moreover,it was found that two cognitive factors,namely perceived entrepreneurial costs and entrepreneurial alertness,respectively play mediating effects in the relationship between kinship network and peasants' tourism entrepreneurial intention.(2)The kinship social network has a critical positive impact on entrepreneurial performance of rural tourism micro enterprises.It was found that "psychological resource" is mainly embedded in and mobilized through the entrepreneurs'kinship networks.And,psychological resource which provides entrepreneurs with optimism,confidence,and resilience showed the greatest positive impact both on entrepreneurs'perceived economic performance and entrepreneurial happiness.Although new established tourism enterprises have more potential to mobilize intellectual resource and asset resource trough commercial social networks,however,these commercial-network-embedded resources were found to have relatively limited effects on entrepreneurial performance,compared with the effect of psychological resource.(3)The kinship social network is generally beneficial to the growth of rural tourism micro-enterprises,but over reliance on the kinship network will lead to a reverse effect.That is,on the one hand,due to its advantage in proving fine-grained information,low-cost resource support,and sincere emotional support to entrepreneurs,the kinship network generally have positive association with the revenue growth rate of tourism micro-enterprises;on the other hand,due to the high cohesion,high redundancy and high homogeneity of the kinship network,a overdependence on the kinship network would hinder sustainable growth of rural tourism micro-enterprises.More specifically,just as the result of sub-study 3 showed,an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between entrepreneurs' reliance on kinship network and the revenue growth rate of the tourism micro-enterprises.(4)The kinship social network will hinder the qualitative growth of tourism micro-enterprises which is defined as the separation between family and business.In this dissertation,we define "qualitative" growth of tourism micro-enterprises as the separation between family and business.In specific,three dimensions of separation,namely place separation,personnel separation,and objective separation were utilized to operationalize the extent of "qualitative" growth.It was found that although the kinship network and the resources embedded in this network play an important role in promoting the establishment and operation of tourism micro-enterprises;,relying on the network and its embedded resources would impede tourism micro-enterprises from stripping family factors away from the business.In contrast,the commercial network and its embedded resources could help enhancing the separations,thus promoting tourism micro-enterprises' "qualitative" growth from a family mode of production to a modern capitalist mode.In summary,by using firsthand data,this dissertation adopted a theory-driven empirical paradigm,and investigated the varied effects of kinship network on rural tourism micro-enterprises across the different dimensions of firm emergence,operation,and growth.Findings of this dissertation also provide some managerial implications as follows.Firstly,beyond conventional entrepreneurship education and counselling programs focusing on individual level,policy makers can develop kinship-group-level programs,so as to promoting entrepreneurship in the rural tourism sector in a more efficient way.Secondly,by constructing a platform of modern commercial network for newly established tourism micro-enterprises,local governments and policy makers can enhance peasant entrepreneurs' access to heterogeneous and professional entrepreneurial resources,which would contribute to more rapid and healthy growth of tourism micro-enterprises.Thirdly,with an understanding of kinship network's complex effect on tourism micro-enterprises'growth direction,policy makers and practitioners can "manage" the growth of tourism micro-enterprises more meticulously in accordance with market positioning of the rural tourism destination,so as to obtain competitive advantage of the destination.Lastly,as for governments of all levels,understanding the underlying mechanism of the emergence,performance and growth of these endogenous rural tourism micro-enterprises would lead to more efficient and effective use of tourism industry in promoting Rural Revitalization in China.