Social networks matter in the innovation processes of young and small firms, since ‘innovation does not exist in a vacuum (Van De Ven, 1986: 601).’ The contacts a firm has could both generate advantages for further innovation and growth, and disadvantages leading to inertia and...

This paper is part of a broader research project that aims to analyse the emerging private business sector in China by focusing on three topics.

Account managers invest in two distinct, compensatory social ties to achieve social capital, namely peripheral knowledge ties and implementation support ties. The first ties require communal investments, which consist of organizational citizenship behaviors and peripheral information sharing....

Chinese entrepreneurs innovatively manage organisations in the absence of strong economic institutions, under conditions of high environmental and technological uncertainty. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate how Chinese entrepreneurs can be successful...

In this paper, we draw on the literature about gift exchange to suggest a conceptualization of the emergence, maintenance and use of social capital (SK). We thus open up the black box of how social relations are established, and are able to indicate what can be meaningfully ascribed to social...

Depending on the kind of literature networks in general, and Chinese networks in particular seem to be different phenomena, or are explained by different factors leaving the interested public puzzled. Whether Chinese networks resemble Clans, Clubs, or Mafia-kind of organizations is as much...

This paper deals with differences in the rate of self-employment (business ownership) in 15 European countries for the period 1978-2000, focusing on the influence of dissatisfaction and using the framework of occupational choice. Using two different measures of dissatisfaction, in addition to...

Analyzing a cross-country panel of 16 OECD countries from 2002 to 2005, we find that higher unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity. Our results hold regardless of entrepreneurial motivation (necessity or opportunity) and entrepreneurial type (imitative or innovative).

We study a unique sample of 1,547 nascent entrepreneurs in Germany and analyze which factors are associated with their start-up satisfaction. Our results identify a group of nascent entrepreneurs that “cannot get satisfaction†with their start-up because they did not choose to become...