Entrepreneurs' Social Capital And Social Entrepreneurial Intention

Compared with traditional business start-ups,social entrepreneurship is characterized by both commerciality and sociality.As a new form of social organization,social enterprises advocate the use of business models and tools to generate innovative solutions to social problems with profit-driven income as the main support.It is a better choice in the face of increasing social contradictions while the government,the market and the third sector can't respond to social demands effectively.Social entrepreneurial behavior has thus become a focus of scholars' attention and research.Foreign studies on social entrepreneurship began as early as the 1980s,while social entrepreneurship in our country started relatively late.Research on this area has only emerged since the beginning of this century,and the research themes are mostly concept definition,characteristics of social entrepreneurship,social entrepreneurs,business models,social entrepreneurial orientation,etc.In terms of method,it is mainly qualitative analysis and lacks quantitative research.As for content,most of researches are on processes and results,and lack of antecedents to trigger social entrepreneurship.Based on this,the paper takes social entrepreneurial intention as the research topic,and from the perspective of social capital,explores why and how social entrepreneurs' entrepreneurial intention is affected by social capital when they start social entrepreneurship.At the same time,as there is essential difference between social entrepreneurship and business venture,social entrepreneurs tend to have a stronger tendency of prosocial behavior compared with ordinary entrepreneurs.Therefore,the prosocial behavior was introduced as a regulatory variable to explore the relationship between independent variables and dependent variable under its regulation.The paper adopts the empirical research method to collect data and carry out data analysis through questionnaire survey,and questionnaires are conducted on workers who are engaged in public welfare undertakings or potential social entrepreneurs.The results of the study show that social entrepreneurs' structural capital has a negative impact on social entrepreneurial intention,while relational capital and cognitive capital both have a positive impact on it.At the same time,prosocial behavior plays a positive regulatory role between entrepreneurs' structural capital and social entrepreneurial intention,making the negative effect between structural capital and social entrepreneurial intention more pronounced.It also plays a positive role in the relationship between relational capital and social entrepreneurial intention as well as between cognitive capital and socialentrepreneurial intention,so that the positive effect of the two kinds of capital on social entrepreneurial intention is further strengthened.Based on the results,it is proposed that social entrepreneurs should accumulate enough relational and cognitive capital,thereby inspiring social entrepreneurial intention,starting social entrepreneurship and reducing the resistance in the process of social entrepreneurship.At the same time,social entrepreneurs should always pay attention to society,take social goals as the starting point and the end result,and cultivate their own prosocial behavior tendencies so as to better conduct social entrepreneurship.