Entrepreneurial Social Networks to Obtain Resources and Organizational Legitimacy: Multiple Cases Study with Social Entrepreneurs
Keywords:
Social entrepreneurship. Social networks. Ties. Resources. Organizational legitimacy.Abstract
Also named as social networking, entrepreneurial social networks discuss relations with other organizations, business groups and people who help entrepreneurs to create enterprises. The general objective of this study is to analyze how social entrepreneurs during the conception phase of their business use their social networks or relationships to get resources and organizational legitimacy. Specifically intended to identify social ties as defined by Granovetter (1973), points out the resources mobilized through social networks according Brush, Greene and Hart (2001) classification and verify social organizations legitimacy criteria based on Atack (1999) typology. This study has a qualitative approach and is exploratory and descriptive in nature. The research strategy adopted was of multiple case study. Evidences were collected through semi-structured interviews with three social entrepreneurs. The dialogues were recorded and subsequently transcribed. The interview content was analyzed adopting the content analysis technique. After analyzing the cases, it was observed in the entrepreneurs social networks both weak ties as strong. The latter were basically family, friends and professional colleagues. With regard to weak ties, public and private companies and donors/ individuals collaborators were cited. The strong ties, in particular, encouraged virtually all types of resources needed for the conception of the social organizations analyzed. Weak ties, in turn, promoted a good portion of the physical resources required for the analyzed organizations. It was also possible to observe that social networks contributed to legitimize the analyzed social organizations. It was verified how much they were participative with respect to promotion of formal-procedural legitimacy. However, entrepreneurs still could have enhanced this source of resources, taking better advantage within the substantive-purposeful legitimacy, fostering the promotion of mechanisms to motivate and attract volunteers, developing criteria to measure the effectiveness of promoted activities or taking advantage of the intellectual capital of their networks by promoting collective decision- making.
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