کارآفرینی اینترنتی: سرمایه اجتماعی، سرمایه انسانی و عملکرد سرمایه گذاری اینترنت در چین

This article examines the interaction effects of social capital and human capital (experience) of entrepreneurs on the performance of Internet ventures. The empirical data are composed of the longitudinal surveys of 94 Internet ventures in Beijing, China. The study found that the interaction of social capital and Western experience of entrepreneurs has a positive effect on the survival likelihood of Internet firms whereas the interaction of social capital and startup experience of entrepreneurs has a negative effect on firm performance.

As China's economy is growing rapidly, the domestic private sector is emerging from the shadows and playing a prominent role in the country's economic development. Owing to the historical, institutional and cultural factors, the private sector in China exhibits a high degree of informality. Many enterprises possess vague property rights, ownership structure, corporate governance mechanisms, and financial records. This gives private entrepreneurs great flexibility to respond to an uncertain world composed of rapidly changing market conditions and unstable government regulations. This environment however also constitutes a great challenge to entrepreneurs to put their businesses on a firmer footing. Entrepreneurs find that an effective way of managing hostile environments in transition economies is doing business through personal networks of relationships because network ties provide resources and information, and help to find clients, suppliers, and investors, who are socially bound (Batjargal, 2003, Batjargal, 2005a, Batjargal, 2005c and Batjargal, 2006). In this article, I examine the way in which Internet entrepreneurs in China combine their social capital and human capital to create viable businesses. There are two mainstream arguments about what types of social capital or social networks in terms of structure are beneficial to individuals, groups and organizations. On the one hand, coherent and dense networks enable actors to achieve their goals effectively because of cooperative behavior of members, high trust embedded in relationships and informal social mechanisms that control opportunistic behaviors (Coleman, 1988). On the other hand, sparse and non-redundant networks rich in structural holes facilitate actors’ access to new information, opportunities and resources promoting success of instrumental actions (Burt, 1992). The instrumental value of networks however is contingent upon the social context, and behavioral patterns of individuals and organizations (Galaskiewicz and Zaheer, 1999). For example, Burt (1997) argued that structural holes, i.e., disconnections between non-redundant contacts in a network, are especially valuable to managers with few peers. Podolny and Baron (1997) reported that structural holes in individual networks had significant positive and negative effects on career advancement depending on the network content. At organizational level, Gulati and Higgins (2003) established that new firms’ ties to prominent venture capital firms are particularly beneficial to IPO success during cold markets, while ties to prominent investment banks are particularly beneficial to IPO success during hot markets. There is however a considerable gap in the literature on how structural properties of entrepreneurs’ networks affect venture performance, and how network structures interact with human capital of entrepreneurs, and influence outcome variables. The purpose of this study is to examine the interaction effects of networks, on the one hand, and new venture startup experience, Internet industry experience, and Western (North American and Western European) experience of entrepreneurs, on the other hand, on the survival of Internet firms. The country and industry context is the Internet industry in China. The Chinese Internet industry is an emergent sector, and therefore, there are a few commonly accepted rules, norms and “taken for granteds” to govern relationships (Nee, 1992). This results in greater institutional and social uncertainties that make personal relationships as important resources to get things done (Xin and Pearce, 1996). Furthermore, study of Internet entrepreneurship in general and Internet ventures in emerging markets in particular is a new research field. I think that this study is one of the first studies of the Chinese information and Internet industry that generated US$ 99.2 billion in revenues in 2001 (Business Weekly, 2002). Finally, the relationship intense cultural milieu in China makes social networks dynamic and important for performance. These reasons justify the choice of the industry and country contexts of this study. This article is structured as follows. In Section 1, I examine the Internet industry evolution in China. In the following part, I discuss the research literature on the Chinese version of networks—guanxi. In Section 3, I propose formal propositions on social capital, human capital and venture performance in China. Section 4 describes the sample and data collection, the variables and measurements, and the construct validation procedures. In Sections 5 and 6, I report the findings and discuss them in light of network theory. In Section 7, I discuss the implications, the contributions and the limitations of this study.

In the Chinese institutional and cultural context, the effects of structural holes on venture performance are contingent upon entrepreneurs’ human capital (experience). The entrepreneurs who have different experience, i.e., startup versus Western, are effective players in different networks. Cohesive networks may be beneficial to those who started businesses before and who are embedded more in local networks. On the contrary, sparse networks may be beneficial to those entrepreneurs who studied and worked in the West. “Local” and “Western” entrepreneurs capitalize on the different benefits each type of networks offers. “Local” entrepreneurs benefit from high trust, cooperative behavior and informal norms in integrated networks. Western returnee entrepreneurs benefit from diverse information, opportunity and control benefits in sparse networks that connect different clusters, regions, and countries. This study indicates that the network closure advanced by Coleman (1988) and the network brokerage advocated by Burt (1992) are not mutually exclusive, and both can be effective depending on the context. This study contributes to the research literature on Chinese guanxi networks in the sense that indirect effects of structural holes in guanxi networks on outcome variables can be both positive and negative. To date, this article is first study that measured structural holes in guanxi networks. This paper may make a contribution to the literature on Internet industry and e-business by its suggestive findings that Internet entrepreneurs do create values by combining their social and human capital. Finally, this study is one of first studies that examined Internet entrepreneurship in a transition economy. Therefore, I claim a contribution to the management research literature on transition economies. Several limitations of the study should be discussed. Some measurements are context specific, e.g., Western experience. This may impose limits on generalizability of the findings to other social and cultural contexts. The industry context of the study is the Internet industry in China, which was less than 10 years old at the time of the surveys. The institutional, regulatory and market immaturity may have affected the results although I assume that all entrepreneurs are exposed to the similar country, industry and cultural contexts to the same extent. The sample size is small, and standard deviations for some variables are rather high. I used social network measurements that were developed in the Western context for measuring an indigenous phenomenon deeply rooted in Confucius cultures—guanxi. In this way, I may have overlooked unique features of guanxi. Furthermore, I used the number of distant ties as a proxy for structural holes because they were correlated with network size and density. This may constitute a shortcoming. Lastly, some of the findings are rather tentative, and therefore, one should be cautious of over generalization of the results. Future research should examine whether contingent effects (interactions) of structural holes are universal across cultures or culture-specific. Another dimension of future research is to examine how effects of other network parameters, e.g., network content and relational trust, on performance are influenced by contextual and behavioral factors. The study implies that entrepreneurs should deploy various types of capital, e.g., social and human capital, in recombined manners for entrepreneurial success.