Social Capital Research, Opportunity Identification Behavior

Although the research history of entrepreneurship is not long, but both theorists and practitioners are the thorough entrepreneurship researcher. Especially in recent years, scholars have begun to apply the basic theory of multidisciplinary to entrepreneurship research. Entrepreneurial activity is an economic activity. At the same time, it is a social activity. And so it is a relatively systematic research method that we apply economic theory and sociological theory to entrepreneurship research. In this paper, we use the basic theory of entrepreneurship, social capital theory and other related economic theory to study the entrepreneurial opportunities recognition behavior from the perspective of social capital.In this paper, we firstly introduced the basic theory of entrepreneurship and social capital. Among them, the former mainly includes the content and definition of entrepreneurship; the latter mainly were described from the social capital definition, measurement, impact and multi-level view of social capital. Meanwhile, we reviewed literatures from the start and opportunity recognition theory, cognitive theory and opportunity recognition, social capital theory and opportunity recognition behavior. Then, based on previous studies, this article's conceptual model was constructed:social capital will affect the entrepreneurial opportunities recognition behavior, and we put forward the related research hypotheses. Among them, the social capital has three dimensions:the structural dimension, relationship dimension and cognitive dimension. The entrepreneurial opportunity recognition behavior includes five sub-behaviors:knowledge acquisition, competitive examination, forward-looking search, innovative behavior, collective action. In empirical research, this paper uses structural equation modeling approach to the confirmatory study. Through the research we have come to:the structural dimension of social capital has positive impact on knowledge acquisition, competitive examination, forward-looking search and innovative behavior; the relationship and cognitive dimension of social capital both have a positive impact on five sub-behaviors:knowledge acquisition, competitive examination, forward-looking search, innovative behavior, collective action. Based on these results, entrepreneurs need active social interact to acquire knowledge in the opportunity recognition process and then they have their own understanding on the future direction and make a collective decision-making of what is relevant information.