Research On Entrepreneurial Network Structure Based On The Paradox Of Embeddedness

Entrepreneurial activities are an important force to promote the level of national employment,enhance micro-economic vitality,and improve the ability to transform technological achievements.In recent years,nation-wide entrepreneurial activities have shown a blowout situation in China.With the liability of newness and smallness,entrepreneurial networks are an important way for entrepreneurs to discover entrepreneurial opportunities,acquire entrepreneurial resources,adapt to economic transformation,expand their living space,and gain competitive advantage.However,excessive network embedding will lead to negative effects,such as path dependence,network homogeneity and redundancy,network conflict and opportunism behaviors.The double-edged sword attribute of network embedding forms the theoretical proposition of "The paradox of embeddedness",which not only expresses on tie strength paradox in the level of relational embeddedness,but also on the network diversity paradox and network openness paradox in the level structural embeddedness.As a well-known theoretical proposition in social network research,the paradox of embeddedness is involved in many fields,such as individual work network and discussion work,enterprise network,cluster networks,and innovation networks.However,there are many shortcomings of analysis approaches and methods on it.In the field of entrepreneurial networks,it still focuses on the positive role of the network,and pays insufficient attention to the negative effect.This theoretical proposition is little researched in entrepreneurial network.So discussing the paradox of embeddedness has important theoretical significance in this field.At the same time,under the premise of resource constraints,it is a practical problem for entrepreneurs to configure the network structure.The paradox of embeddedness is more prominent in early entrepreneurial activities of small and micro enterprises.Therefore,this paper takes this as the research object and hopes to solve three research questions:(1)How do entrepreneurs judge the degree of network structure is over-embedding?(2)Is it important of the interaction between different network dimensions for the paradox of embeddedness?(3)How do entrepreneurs configure network structures both with paradoxical nature simultaneously?To this end,using network embedding theory and entrepreneurial network theory as theoretical basis,tie strength,network diversity and network openness are selected as research objects.Direct and indirect effects.In the theoretical aspect,according to the theoretical framework of entrepreneurial network elements,the theoretical model of“network structure-entrepreneur's ability-entrepreneurial performance”is established as the overall framework.In the empirical aspect,based on the nonlinear competitive mediation model,nonlinear moderated model,response surface analysis model and block variable model,a path analysis framework of"three-level additive and four-level multiplicative" is taken to test research hypotheses with data which collected from questionnaires by the software of Mplus 7.4.For the first research question,the ABC(Antecedent-benefit-cost)analysis framework is used to establish three nonlinear competitive mediation models(Model 1),for analyzing the paradox of tie strength,network openness and network diversity which mediated by entrepreneurial ability and cognitive bias on entrepreneurial performance.It is found that there is paradox of embeddedness for these three network dimensions.But the direct effect,indirect effect and total effect is different respectively.For the second research question,on the basis of Model 1,three nonlinear moderated competitive mediation models(Model 2)were established.The results show that the network diversity has an enhanced moderated effect on tie strength,Network openness has a weaken moderated effect on tie strength earlier and an enhanced moderated effect later.Network openness has an enhanced moderated effect on network diversity earlier and a weaken moderated effect later.For the third research question,the response surface analysis model(Model 3-1)was built with entrepreneurial capability,cognitive bias and entrepreneurial performance as independent variables.It is found that,in general,the congruence of tie strength and network diversity and the congruence of tie strength and network openness,is conducive to improving entrepreneurial ability and entrepreneurial performance,reducing cognitive bias.Conversely,the congruence of network diversity and network opening is conducive to reducing entrepreneurial capability and entrepreneurial performance,improving cognitive bias.On the basis of Model 3-1 and Model 1,three linear competitive mediation models(Model 3-2)for block variables are established.The results show that entrepreneurial capability and cognitive bias have a competitive mediation effect between three block variables and entrepreneurial performance.Based on Model 3-2 and Model 2,a linear moderated competitive mediation model(Model 3-3)for block variables was created.It is found that the direct effect,indirect effect and total effect between the congruence of tie strength and network diversity and entrepreneurial performance was moderated by network openness.