Social Capital

Social capital has been loosely defined as benefits accrued as a result of social relationships. Whereas social capital has been a topic of interest across numerous disciplines for many years, it has only recently gained traction in entrepreneurship literature. Empirical research related to social capital in entrepreneurship has accumulated over the past 20 years. The vast majority of theoretical contributions related to social capital in entrepreneurship have come since the beginning of the 21st century. Several traditional theoretical views of social capital have been the most prevalent in the entrepreneurial context. Those seeing the widest application include the embeddedness, network closure, structural holes, and strong/weak ties perspectives.

The embeddedness perspective has been the most commonly utilized theoretical base in entrepreneurship research and comes in two forms: ...