The articulation of social capital in entrepreneurial networks: a glue or a lubricant?

By Alistair R. Anderson, Sarah L. Jack. 2002

644 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While social capital has been applied in a variety of contexts, the nature, role and application of social capital in an entrepreneurial context have not been extensively explored. The nature of social capital presents a conceptual puzzle in that it is said to be both glue, which forms the structure of networks, and at the same time a lubricant that facilitates the operation of networks. Using techniques of participant observation and interviews, this paper attempts to resolve this enigma. It finds that social capital is not a thing, but a process that creates a condition of social capital. The structural and relational aspects are found to be dimensions of this process. Interestingly, the data also demonstrates that there are successful etiquettes of social capital formation. These etiquettes provide the rules and framework for the interactions.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8688d86d7be8b999d620753c85af89d2a56edb86

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The Spatial Dimension of Social Capital (2010, background): “Social capital may thus be fulfilling two crucial functions: It acts as both a glue and a lubricant in social relations (Anderson and Jack 2002).”
Entrepreneurship and Social Capital (2007, background): “It has many different connotations, and so the scope for confusion is considerable (Anderson and Jack, 2002).”
Funding gap, what funding gap? Financial bootstrapping: Supply, demand and creation of entrepreneurial finance (2010, background): “Because of this, the network as a unit of analysis is proposed as it allows an exploration of the construction of meanings arising from social interactions and exchanges ( Anderson and Jack, 2002”
Employee intrapreneurship and work engagement: A latent change score approach (2017, background): “To overcome these challenges and successfully persist in employee intrapreneurship, employees have been shown to seek advice from both internal and external sources to overcome such challenges (e.g., Anderson & Jack, 2002).”
What Kind of Entrepreneurship Drives Regional Development in European Non-core Regions? A Literature Review on Empirical Entrepreneurship Research (2013, background): “In this regard, social capital is considered as “networking capital” (Anderson & Jack, 2002, p. 196; Burt, 2001; Johannisson et al., 2002).”
Information processing and strategic decision-making in small and medium-sized enterprises: The role of human and social capital in attaining decision effectiveness (2013, background): “The structural social capital that is available to the decision-maker creates opportunities for social capital transactions (Adler and Kwon, 2002; Anderson and Jack, 2002).”
All you need is trust? A critical review of the trust and entrepreneurship literature (2012, background): “Thus, trust may be viewed as the lubricant without which network activity would not be possible, thereby representing one of the key properties of social capital (Anderson and Jack, 2002).”
Corporate Venture Capitalists and Independent Venture Capitalists: What do they know, Who do They Know and Should Entrepreneurs Care? (2005, background): “There is a growing stream of research examining the influence of the backgrounds, experience, skills and networks of entrepreneurial teams on the strategies and performance of new ventures (Birley, 1985; Aldrich et al., 1987; Hite & Hesterly, 2001; Anderson & Jack, 2002; Higgins & Gulati, 2003).”
Enacting entrepreneurship as social value creation (2011, background): “…and Anderson 2002; Jack et al., 2008) have challenged the idea of the solitary entrepreneur (Dodd and Anderson, 2007) and how social capital is seen to play a contributory role (Anderson et al., 2007; Anderson and Jack, 2002; Bowey and Easton, 2007; Casson and Giusta, 2007; Lee and Jones, 2008).”
Social capital in the growth of science-and-technology-based SMEs (2008, background): “The external view has been explored by Knoke (1999) and Anderson and Jack (2002), who suggest that social capital is a kind of bridge-building process that links individuals and creates a condition for the effective exchange of information and resources.”
Roles of Social Capital in Venture Creation: Key Dimensions and Research Implications* (2005, methodology): “Such categorization has been widely adopted in other studies such as Anderson and Jack (2002) and Tsai and Ghoshal (1998).”
Business Networks and Economic Development in Rural Communities in the United States (2010, background): “Thus, bonding social capital tends to emerge from strong tie networks and provides the “glue” needed to link community members together (Anderson & Jack, 2002; Putnam).”
The formation and interplay of social capital in crowdfunded social ventures (2014, background): “This holds well with Anderson and Jack (2002) who examine the nature of SC that it is said to be both glue, which forms the structure of networks, and at the same time a lubricant that facilitates the operation of networks.”
Rural entrepreneurship in place: an integrated framework (2019, background): “…under one place-sensitive umbrella, previous efforts aimed at characterizing and explaining rural entrepreneurship from distinct units of analysis (e.g. Kalantaridis and Bika 2016; Berglund, Gaddefors, and Lindgren 2015; Meccheri and Pelloni 2006; Anderson and Obeng 2017; Anderson and Jack 2002).”
Social identity and signalling success factors in online crowdfunding (2016, background): “Connections and relatedness help explain their power to adapt to any change (Anderson and Jack 2002).”
Struggling with social capital: Pakistani women micro entrepreneurs’ challenges in acquiring resources (2017, background): “…has generally focused on bridging and bonding benefits of social capital, found support for its positive effects and explained how negative effects of social capital could be mitigated (Anderson and Jack 2002; Kim and Aldrich 2005; De Carolis and Saparito 2006; Stam, Arzlanian, and Elfring 2014).”