Social Capital and Learning Advantages: A Problem of Absorptive Capacity

By Mathew Hughes, Robert E. Morgan, R. Duane Ireland, Paul Hughes. 2014

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theoretically, social capital allows entrepreneurial firms to capitalize on learning advantages of newness and gain access to knowledge as the foundation for improved performance. But this understates its complexity. We consider whether learning through social capital relationships has a direct effect on performance and whether absorptive capacity mediates and moderates this relationship. We find that network-based learning has no direct relationship with performance, but this is mediated in each instance by absorptive capacity and is moderated twice. Our findings challenge the learning advantages of newness thesis and reveal how absorptive capacity can enable business performance from a firm's network relationships.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/364cdc39ed04a3ce1c0b936960770f0c8fd6870e

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Uncertainty, Knowledge Problems, and Entrepreneurial Action (2018, background): “Effectuation theory (Sarasvathy, 2001), bricolage theory (Baker &Nelson, 2005), and social capital and network theories (Dushnitsky & Lavie, 2010; Hughes et al., 2014) all represent vibrant streams of research focused on exploring how entrepreneurs take action within various environments.”
Explaining the entrepreneurial orientation–performance relationship in emerging economies: The intermediate roles of absorptive capacity and improvisation (2017, unknown): “Why some SMEs underperform despite showing a clear EO is often a function of flaws in the learning architecture of the firm (Hughes et al., 2007, 2014) or knowledge deficits (Short, McKelvie, Ketchen, & Chandler, 2009) that compromise decision-making.”
Coworking-spaces: how a phenomenon of the sharing economy builds a novel trend for the workplace and for entrepreneurship (2016, background): “Also, Hughes et al. (2014) find that the absence of prior knowledge which is often the case for entrepreneurs and specifically for nascent coworking-entrepreneurs constrains them to transfer learning outcomes achieved through social capital behaviors into performance.”