Social Capital and Entrepreneurship concludes by examining the tension between the properties of social networks used in entrepreneurship researchers' models and the limited perspective on networks available to practicing entrepreneurs.

This book provides recent ideas, insights, facts, evidence, frameworks, and perspectives on how and why entrepreneurial families are successful over generations. The book focuses on how families successfully implement entrepreneurship across generations. That success, it argues, requires entrepreneurship at the level of the family, not only in the businesses the family owns and manages. Written by noted academics and consultants who are authorities on family entrepreneurship, the chapters provide a comprehensive exploration of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurial families, their motivations, how they behave over time, and, suggestions for how business families can encourage and sustain entrepreneurship. This comprehensive look at family entrepreneurship will serve as a fundamental reference text for family business consultants, owners, and scholars.

Human resources are the social capital of a firm or business, based on trust as well as on expertise, values, and cultural diversity. This calls for cross-cultural knowledge - an understanding of gender issues and individual differences in the social capital of the firm and society. The dialogue between women entrepreneurship and social capital theory/ research strengthens the fragmented voice of women entrepreneurship, providing the landscape for women entrepreneurs as creators of, and created by, social capital. It indicates how women entrepreneurs appear to have a special position in forming, developing, and reorganizing the social capital in the business world. This book explores social capital in the multiple relationships between gender, management, and entrepreneurship. Twenty-six researchers, representing a variety of disciplines from different parts of the world, provide findings on diverse aspects of the dialogue between women entrepreneurship and social capital. As a consequence, the central concepts - social capital, entrepreneurship, and gender - are given a variety of meanings. Women entrepreneurs and business owners - regardless of their cultural context, branch, and education - provide interesting ideas to the global debate on equality and social capital.

"This book highlights the contextual dimensions of the agribusiness industry through which entrepreneurship researchers would be able to enhance their understanding of entrepreneurship by focusing on the following research question: "Why do individuals, farmers, agrarian, start a new business in the agricultural sector and how do they manage entrepreneurial performance, and what impact it has on the economy?""--

'Lee takes the oft cited belief that entrepreneurial endeavour lives and dies by the quality of the networks set in play, and subjects it to a rigorous and sustained analysis. In this he not only provides the reader with an authoritative theoretical and empirical foray into how entrepreneurs can create and sustain different forms of social capital, he does so with a strong sense of how power frames and taints its acquisition and use. Lee1s book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how in entrepreneurial activity, as in many walks of life, it is those with already established status who set the agenda by which opportunity and its pursuit is constituted'. Robin Holt, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Politics and Society, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Robert Lee drives forward the agenda of socially-situated cognition research, moving beyond a static model of entrepreneurial cognition and offering instead a dynamic, socially embedded, communication-based perspective. He breaks from the traditional focus on either the individual entrepreneurial agent or the social and institutional context of entrepreneurship and makes a serious and skilful effort to provide an integrative understanding of the entrepreneur as placed in a complex, relational and ambiguous context. Recognising that entrepreneurship is both cognitive and relational, he plays with the idea of power within legitimacy creation and through this illustrates the ultimately distributed nature of entrepreneurial processes. This book adds to the growing domain of socially-situated entrepreneurial cognition research and will appeal to those interested in understanding the connection between cognition, communication and legitimacy in the context of entrepreneurship. Jean Clarke, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Organization, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, UK ‘In a very welcome contribution to the literature, Robert Lee explores the social capital mobilised by entrepreneurs and develops a communicative action approach that yields important insights into how would-be entrepreneurs achieve legitimacy through navigating the complex web of power and status relations in which they are enmeshed. This book will appeal not only to those interested in entrepreneurship, but also be a valuable reference source for those interested in the workings of social capital’. Michael Bresnen, Professor of Organisation Studies, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK This book presents a novel and intellectually stimulating account of the understudied links between entrepreneurial newcomers’ bridging ties and their networked cognition. With a paucity of research addressing cognitively specific features of networked language and conduct, The Social Capital of Entrepreneurial Newcomers explores how entrepreneurial newcomers attune their cognition when interacting with high status and powerful vertical bridges. Largely reflecting communication accommodation perspectives, the author theoretically and empirically examines entrepreneurial newcomers’ cognitive ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’ when bridging.

Social Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice is about the creative ways in which social entrepreneurs solve pressing and insurmountable social problems. Theories of social change are presented to help demystify the 'magic' of making an immense, yet durable and irreversible, social impact. Utilizing case studies drawn from various fields and all over the world, the authors document how social entrepreneurs foster bottom-up change that empowers people and societies. They also review the specific personality traits of social entrepreneurs and introduce the new kind of leadership they represent. This book will be valuable to undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students, while remaining accessible to non-academic readers thanks to its clear language, illustrative case studies and guidelines on how to become a successful social entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship is hot. China is hot. Combining these two concepts could therefore be a dangerous act, as it may cause overheating. Chinese entrepreneurs are indeed the subject of a rapidly growing body of literature, academic and popular. However, the bulk of it tends to focus on a few aspects. There are the biographies of ‘famous’ entrepreneurs. While informative, these are usually of a non-academic nature. Academic studies tend to focus on the political and economic environment in which present day Chinese entrepreneurs have to operate. Both types of publications slight the entrepreneurial identity. This study aims at filling this gap with its core question: why do some people become entrepreneurs? The authors have analysed the life stories of a number of Chinese private entrepreneurs to reveal how the entrepreneurial identity of each of them has emerged at the cross section of an number of other identities. This book therefore contributes to a better understanding of Chinese entrepreneurship and the study of entrepreneurship in general.