Narrow Results

The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of social ties in encouraging innovative behaviour. There is limited empirical evidence of the interrelation between these two constructs in current academic literature. This research hypothesizes such relationship in higher academic institutions. To enhance innovativeness of academic staff within universities or R&D institutions, we examined the role of social ties in fostering innovativeness as a main factor in entrepreneurial activities. A survey was sent via a hyperlink to the target sample, facilitated by empirical analysis using correlation and regression analysis. It can be concluded that there is a significant relationship between spending time with social contacts and innovativeness. Limitations and further research are cited to enhance the understanding of the interrelation of the constructs.

The scholarship of entrepreneurship has identified the significance of institutional and social factors in accounting for entrepreneurial activity and firm innovation, especially in emerging economies and transitional societies. However, the lion’s share of the existent literature focuses on entrepreneurs’ characteristics and psychological traits and firms’ structures and strategies. In this study, I develop a relatively comprehensive analytic framework to study the interactive relationships between economic actors’ institutional trust, risk-taking activities and their risk-sharing with social and political actors in shaping firm innovativeness. By analyzing a nationally representative sample of Chinese private companies, I find that entrepreneurs’ legal confidence, risk-taking and risk-sharing activities are positively associated with firm innovativeness, respectively. Entrepreneurs’ risk-taking and risk-sharing activities can substitute for the role of entrepreneurs’ trust in China’s legal system in shaping firm innovativeness. Entrepreneurs’ social ties serve as the most salient factor that modulates the association between entrepreneurs’ institutional trust and innovative activities.

In contemporary China, despite all the efforts in regulating and institutionalizing labor relations, industrial workplaces still witness pervasive opportunism and distrust. Using two-wave nested workplace surveys, collected from over 280 manufactories in the Yangtze Delta region, and semi-structured interviews of factory owners, managers, and ordinary workers, this study explores migrant peasant workers’ rising radicalism in urban China and traces the social and economic origins of this phenomenon. The authors further examine the role of social ties in shaping migrant workers’ resistance and disobedience, and argue that the effect of social ties may be moderated and constrained by the opportunity structure in the organizations.