Besides the three traditional ICs(Intellectual Capital) including Human Capital, Structural Capital and Customer Capital, Social Capital(SC) has been recognized as a forth critical IC of an organization in the network economy. In the 21st century, various kinds of collaborations among organizations such as strategic alliance or virtual organization play a major role in the global competition marketplace; no one can do their business alone. Therefore, only an inter-organizational collaborative team with strong relationships and network ties among the members can more efficiently and effectively discover, evaluate and exploit the emerging entrepreneurial opportunities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of a firm¡¦s social capital on its capabilities to discover, evaluate and exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities.
Three dimensions of a firm¡¦s social capital are canalized. (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998) (1)structural dimension: includes network ties and network configurations (2)cognitive dimension: includes shared codes, languages and narratives (3)relational dimension: includes trust, norm, obligations, and identifications. Moreover, since a firm¡¦s absorptive capability of new knowledge and its past related knowledge base also influence the effectiveness of its exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunity, Absorptive Capability Theory (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990) and current knowledge base of a firm are also used as two variables in the research model to increase the integrity of the model.
An empirical survey methodology is applied to test the research model and hypotheses proposed in this study. Five out of nine hypotheses are validated in our research model with Path Analysis. The research result reveals that the structural dimension of a firm¡¦s social capital has the most impact on its abilities of entrepreneurial opportunities; on the other hand, a firm¡¦s absorptive capability of knowledge is affected by the structural and relational dimensions of social capital. Furthermore, the result validates that both absorptive capability and the abilities of entrepreneurial opportunities of a firm exhibit significant path dependency. This result will be useful to both the academic and business particularly in its advocacy of the cultivation of the structural dimension of a firm¡¦s social capital.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0705104-155101 |
| Date | 05 July 2004 |
| Creators | Liu, Yi-chun |
| Contributors | Chin-ping Wei, Tung-ching Lin, Fen-hui Lin |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0705104-155101 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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