The Effects Of Self-Employers’ Social Networks On Bussiness Performance

Along with the social system reforms, the emergence and development of the self-employers have attracted the attention of researchers and have been studied from different perspectives by different disciplines. Based on the perspective of sociology, with the theoretical basis of social networks, this paper regards the self-employers as the research object, and emphasizes on the analysis of the employers’social networks on their business performance based on the summary of their social networks’ characteristics, and tries to reveal the effects of social networks on the process of the self-employers.The method of this paper is the quantitative research and the data is from the 2014 Job-Net Survey. By descriptive analysis and regression analysis, research founds can be summarized as follows:1. Compared with the employees, the self-employers are younger and larger percentage of whom are married men with rural residence registration, non-party identity and lower education. The policy adjustment and social reform is the postulates on which people can have the chance to be self-employed, and nearly sixty percent of them have the experience of being employees. All these cases show that the macro-system structural adjustment has great impacts on individual action choices and shapes one’s career life.2. Compared with the employees, the self-employers can get more financial supports from the Daily Supporting Networks, for whom the Social Eating Networks is an important way to obtain social resources. They are more active in activities like "Entertaining Guests", "Being the Chief Guests" and "Being Invited along with the Chief Guests" than the employees. Meanwhile their New Year Greeting Networks has larger social scale, lower social density, higher level of social heterogeneity and a higher top of network, which makes it easier for them to establish relationships with the advantageous social class.3. Social networks matter a great deal to funds-collection. Around ninety percent of the self-employed people gather money from their social networks. The ways of gathering differs upon the amount of money:they tend to gather money from family or relatives when they need a small sum of money; when they need more money, social relationships like friends or marketing ways will play a greater role. The first-year income has a positive correlation with the investment.4. About the "current capital amount", who has the "strong ties" with the helper and obtains "information resources" will have positive effects on capital gathering compared with those without help after controlling other variables. It shows that the effects brought by the social networks mainly represent on the information resources, even the strong ties can’t bring about the directly influential connections. With the deepening marketization, the economic action process follows more rational logic than ever before. The biggest helpers who are outside system, in the managerial positions and the peers of the self-employed (non-peers can also help) have significant influence on the operating capital increase.About the "Current Operating Income", after controlling other variables, the emotional supports can increase the operating income compared with those self-employed people without help. On the financial supports, the actual happened activities like "lended money" have great effects on operating income growth, while the potential activities may needs at least four potential lenders to achieve the same result. The operating income can increase when the three indexes of the Social Eating Networks ("Entertaining Guests", "Being the Chief Guests" and "Being Invited along with the Chief Guests") happens in a high frequency, which indicates that the self-employers should play an active part in improving relations so that the ties which have been taken can be used actually. On the New Year Greeting Networks, the more social capital, the higher level of heterogeneity, the more social ties with the managerial class in the networks, the more significant effects will be on the operating income.