Social Capital and Entrepreneurship: Knowledge in Context

Résumé

There have been many attempts to discuss and elaborate the possible and necessary relationship between social capital and entrepreneurship. The total conception of this relationship is used but not sufficiently grasped since the use of the concept of social capital itself is debated. It is very often difficult to subject economic matters and processes to sociological analysis, since these activities and processes (as is the case of entrepreneurial ones) are considered to be only economic and financial in nature. But the total conception of entrepreneurship is to include all the various methods of analysis, financial, economic, social, since entrepreneurship is first of all a socio-economic process. Entrepreneurship is  “not merely an economic process but draws from the social context which shapes and forms entrepreneurial outcomes. Embedding is the mechanism whereby an entrepreneur becomes part of the local structure. This enables entrepreneurs to draw upon and use resources. Indeed, in some instances, being embedded actually created opportunities”(Jack and Anderson, 2000, p. 467)[14]. The mechanism whereby this embeddedness is set and conducted could be referred to as ‘social capital’.  This type of capital in the study of entrepreneurship is very often referred to as the ‘network perspective’