Narrow Results

New product development is considered as one of the survival strategies for organisations with high risk which is related to extreme failure rate that should not be neglected. Among internal and contextual factors which affect winning or losing in new product development (NPD), the role of top management team as key decision makers is critical. The objective of our research is to explore managerial factors influencing success in new product development. To find out these factors, relevant literature was reviewed and specific top managers were interviewed. Afterwards, a survey was administrated to elicit the opinions of managers involved in NPD in accordance to the degree of each factor’s importance. This study examined six factors assumed to be critical in top management level to achieve success in NPD including commitment, regulatory focus, entrepreneurial orientation, social capital, international orientation and tendency of top managers to future study.

This chapter examines the effects of social capital and human capital on occupational attainment in Chinese cities during a 50-year span from 1964 to 2014. An analysis of a 2014 survey presents the following results: (1) As compared to non-users, users of job-search contacts to gain information or favoritism conduct more extensive search, receive more job offers, and obtain higher entry-level wage. (2) Higher-educated job seekers take more time to complete a search, especially when they use social contacts, leading to higher income return of education. (3) There has been a persistent effect of social capital on income during the process of market transition, even though the influence of favoritism has weakened since China joined the WTO around 2001.

This study discusses the impact of personality traits, social capital, and dynamic capability on entrepreneurial performances. We finds that what affects entrepreneurial performance directly most in descending order are dynamic capability, social capital, and personality traits. Social capital is the mediating effect between personality traits and dynamic capability, and social capital is also the mediating effect between personality traits and entrepreneurial performance. In addition, personality trait has a significant positive impact on entrepreneurial performance, social capital and dynamic capability; social capital has a significant positive impact on dynamic capability, and entrepreneurial performance; dynamics capability has a significant positive impact on entrepreneurial performance.

Careful investment of social and human capital within the organisation structure has been believed to improve the performance of the workforce and firms and is also observed to have a constructive impact on the firm and employee performance. A superior human capital and social capital is the accelerator of a firm’s growth. While entrepreneurial firms are agile in themselves, they need to have strong ties with their customers, clients, teams/employees, investors, ecosystem and industry experts, debtors, vendors, subcontractors, etc. and here the need and benefits of social skills not only among owners/founders but also in their teams and employees are always in high demand. A young enterprise faces many challenges, the same as any giant corporate firm. Founders often experience that they are working against the clock in managing both business and human resource challenges, even though they do agree that the entrepreneurial-agile and high-performance-driven culture should not be a substitute for an ethical-courageous-people-friendly culture. This chapter discusses various challenges and issues faced by small and medium businesses and employees of small business firms at their level, and how both parties collectively are trying to support and overcome these challenges, so as to make the work as effective as possible. The chapter is prepared through a comprehensive literature review and data/information has been derived from various secondary sources with a discussion with some start-up founders and small business owners. The chapter also focused on other challenges such as related to human resource development practices, innovation, decision making, and the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on some small businesses are also discussed. The chapter also shares recommended solutions to alter current practices, policies, and processes which can help in addressing operative challenges and can help in developing sustainable practices.

Prior research has alluded to the link between religion, trust and entrepreneurial activity, however little research has been done in the South African context. This chapter explores the role of religion amongst homogeneous religious groups in the formation of trust-based relationships amongst entrepreneurs, as a pre-condition to developing social capital and thereby enabling access to necessary resources for entrepreneurial support. A qualitative, exploratory research study with 19 entrepreneurs from Hindu, Jewish and Muslim religious groups was conducted using semi-structured interviews. The interview responses were analyzed through a thematic analysis of the data collected to explore constructs identified through a Social Capital Theory conceptual model. The study found that religious behavior leads to social cohesiveness, allowing trust relationships to form. The study further found that religious trust relationships act as a form of social capital for some religious groups, providing access to resources which encourage and support entrepreneurial activity. This study contributes to the field of entrepreneurship by highlighting the opportunity for entrepreneurs to engage their religious trust networks to access important resources to assist in the start-up, growth and sustainability of their business.

To explore the relationship between social capital, psychological capital, and the entrepreneurial performance of returning farmers, this research from the perspective of social capital and psychological capital, using 400 sample data collected in Sichuan Province to verify through structural equation modeling, the empirical research has three findings. Firstly, the social capital and psychological capital of returning entrepreneurial farmers affect the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities positively. Among them, social capital plays a more significant role. Secondly, entrepreneurial opportunity identification affects the entrepreneurial performance of returning farmers positively. Finally, entrepreneurial opportunity identification plays a mediating role between social capital, psychological capital, and the entrepreneurial performance of returning farmers.

This chapter follows the journey of Doc’s Bar & Grill and how the social capital of local firms can be used to overcome emergency situations. To explain how this is possible, this article employs the use of the layered account autoethnography. The setting of this article is mainly at Doc’s Bar & Grill in Potosi, Texas. It illustrates how social capital helped Doc’s overcome extreme circumstances by using storytelling and theory “vignettes” to provide insight on particular circumstances and how the social capital of Doc’s was used to help the firm survive. This article is of benefit to academics and practicing entrepreneurs alike because it displays at the single level how Doc’s Bar & Grill survived multiple disasters by the use of its social capital to call on stakeholders to support the bar survive in its most vulnerable moments.

This chapter begins with a discussion of pluralism by focusing on the differences between civic and theological pluralism. A special subset of civic pluralism from Eboo Patel is introduced with three core concepts: respect for identity, relationships with different communities, and a commitment to the common good.This understanding of civic pluralism, combined with social capital forms the theoretical basis for a public narrative analysis of Patel’s founding of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), which is designed to bring people together, despite having different religious views.The creation of the IFYC is an act of social entrepreneurship but also one of narrative entrepreneurship that bridges the gap between competing institutional narratives.The chapter ends with a call for action for the practical action of equipping college students, faculty, and staff to be interfaith leaders who, in turn, impact the national community, as well as the more abstract and broad action of bringing America together around a “civil religion.”

Decision makers often rationalize offshore outsourcing by comparing hourly rates for domestic and offshore workers. This approach is dangerous because it assumes domestic and offshore workers are equivalent “factors of production.” Once engaged in offshore outsourcing, senior executives are often disappointed. Many complain that offshore suppliers do not understand their business, deliver late, and produce poor quality work. In reality, the problems are not caused primarily by the supplier — they are primarily caused by the client’s naïve focus on only costs and failure to invest properly in the relationship. Social capital is simply the idea that knowledge and resources are exchanged, work gets done, and value is created through social relationships. Practitioners should invest the right amount of social capital to ensure that they get best overall value from offshore outsourcing. Among the 24 U.S. client firms studied, U.S. Manufacturing leveraged social capital the best. Its social capital investment yielded the most strategic results from offshore outsourcing. U.S. manufacturing’s suppliers helped to build innovative products faster and cheaper than in-house provision alone. However, before achieving a strategic advantage with offshore outsourcing, U.S. manufacturing failed in its initial offshore initiatives because managers only focused on costs and ignored the social dimensions of outsourcing. After diagnosing the causes of its initial failures, U.S. manufacturing remedied the supplier relationships by investing the right amount of social capital.

Among the social determinants of health, social capital is gaining increasing attention in health economics and health policy. Although the boundaries of the concept of social capital are still under debate, the essence of social capital is that of favoring and supporting cooperation within communities, allowing them to supply a range of services which are beneficial to individual health. This chapter, after a brief overview of the debate about the conceptualization of social capital, discusses in some detail the mechanisms which relate social capital to health and offers a review of the recent empirical literature, focusing, although not exclusively, on developing countries. In the second part, this chapter contributes to the empirical literature by estimating the association between individual social capital and health in a cross-country setting including 93 countries, the largest ever used in this literature. Results confirm the beneficial role that social capital has in individual health and unveil a pattern so far rather overlooked, that the influence of social capital seems to be stronger in developed than developing countries. The third part of the chapter focuses on policy interventions and recommendations. It provides a broad taxonomy of policies, motivated by theoretical models of investment in social capital. Next, it discusses a number of academic papers describing and evaluating interventions aimed at creating social capital, and concludes by describing a few interventions realized by two organizations whose purpose is to help communities accumulate social capital.

This chapter introduces the system for crisis management in Sweden. Over the last century, Sweden has gone from being a poor European backwater to being among the countries with the highest human development in the world. The droughts and harsh winters that killed thousands and drove numerous Swedes to emigrate in the past are mere distractions today and the contemporary system for crisis management is designed to deal with a broader variety of crises than the ones triggered by natural hazards. The system is based on the principles of responsibility, parity and proximity, and distributes sector and area responsibility for crisis management to numerous actors. It is built to a great extent on collaboration between these actors, which is challenging but working relatively well in the cultural context of consensus-seeking and compliance to official guidelines and accepted rules of engagement. However, the system is in itself ambiguous in the sense of distributing responsibility to all kinds of actors and then focusing almost exclusively on public actors in legislation, guidelines and practice. There is also often a gap between policy and practice concerning how area responsibility is exercised, and a lack of clarity in current sector specific legislation.

The increasing magnitude and frequency of natural disasters put growing pressure on disaster risk reduction (DRR). DRR strategies have traditionally relied upon risk identification as the first step in assessing disaster risks, but they are incapable of planning for all risks that a community will face. In most countries, current DRR strategies focus on prevention and mitigation of identifiable risks. They seek to build specified resilience — resilience to known risks. On the contrary, there are no strategies that aim to build general resilience to address unexpected risks. This is also the case for South Australia, where this study took place. This chapter explains the importance of broadening the focus of DRR strategies beyond specified resilience to also include general resilience. Starting from a sense-making framework on resilience to known and unexpected risks, focus group discussions were facilitated to assess systemic conditions that have an impact on community resilience to unexpected risks, that is, those that most people are not prepared to face. System of Systems (SoS) and complex systems thinking (CST) were used to explore potential to integrate systemic approaches to current DRR strategies. The study involved community members, the Australian Red Cross and State Government agencies responsible for disaster mitigation and prevention in South Australia. Systemic factors residing outside the scope of the investigated DRR SoS highlighted the need for “feedback policies” that take into account modern community routines and new characteristics of social relations dynamically. Key recommendations and insights have local, national and international relevance.

In recent years, we have observed a striking upsurge of organized voluntary activity and the creation of private, nonprofit or non-governmental organizations around the world. This study explores to what extent China is part of the global associational revolution. It aims at charting the size, scope and structure of the associational world in China, in a way that not only yields solid and objective information about China, but also makes it possible to undertake cross-society comparisons later.