The Structure of Founding Teams: Homophily, Strong Ties, and Isolation among U.S. Entrepreneurs

By Martin Ruef, Howard E. Aldrich, Nancy M. Carter. American Sociological Review, 2003

1,312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The mechanisms governing the composition of formal social groups (e.g., task groups, organizational founding teams) remain poorly understood, owing to (1) a lack of representative sampling from groups found in the general population, (2) a “success” bias among researchers that leads them to consider only those groups that actually emerge and survive, and (3) a restrictive focus on some theorized mechanisms of group composition (e.g., homophily) to the exclusion of others. These shortcomings are addressed by analyzing a unique, representative data set of organizational founding teams sampled from the U.S. population. Rather than simply considering the properties of those founding teams that are empirically observed, a novel quantitative methodology generates the distribution of all possible teams, based on combinations of individual and relational characteristics. This methodology permits the exploration of five mechanisms of group composition—those based on homophily, functionality, status expectations, network constraint, and ecological constraint. Findings suggest that homophily and network constraints based on strong ties have the most pronounced effect on group composition. Social isolation (i.e., exclusion from a group) is more likely to occur as a result of ecological constraints on the availability of similar alters in a locality than as a result of status-varying membership choices.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de106ad55eb2435234212974fa8937ab842ad861

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

Discretion Within Constraint: Homophily and Structure in a Formal Organization (2012, neutral): “…of homophily (e.g., Lincoln and Miller 1979, South et al. 1982, Brass 1985, Bielby and Baron 1986, Marsden 1987, McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1987, Shrum et al. 1988, Ibarra 1992, Kalleberg et al. 1996, Ibarra 1997, Ruef et al. 2003, Singh et al. 2010) have focused primarily or exclusively on gender.”
Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite (2016, background): “In contrast, the “embedded elites” perspective emphasizes social and network costs of migration that limit the attractiveness of moving for tax reasons, and that ground millionaires in the regions where they became successful (Dahl and Sorenson 2009, 2012; Ruef et al. 2003; Saxenian 1994).”
The impact of gender, social capital and networks on business ownership: a research agenda (2005, background): “Such support is therefore sought from what social network theory refers to as “alters” ( Ruef et al. , 2003”
Tough Love: How Communal Schemas and Contracting Practices Build Relational Capital in Entrepreneurial Teams (2009, background): “Most new ventures are started by entrepre neurial teams (Ruef et al., 2003).”
How network-based incubation helps start-up performance: a systematic review against the background of management theories (2017, background): “On the one hand, benefits from social capital accrue from a high degree of homophily because of high reciprocal understanding (Ruef et al. 2003).”
Friends, Family, or Fools: Entrepreneur Experience and its Implications for Equity Distribution and Resource Mobilization (2012, result): “Consistent with these arguments, Ruef et al. (2003) found that the entrepreneurs are more likely to select close social relations as team members, and, interestingly, show a marked preference for close social ties over team diversity.”
Does a different view create something new? The effect of employee diversity on innovation (2011, neutral): “The characteristics can be divided into ascribed and achieved characteristics (Ruef et al., 2003).”