Rethinking Social Capital: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems as Contested Communities

Abstract

This paper offers new conversations on entrepreneurial ecosystems as contested communities through a critique of extant work that relies uncritically on social capital. It offers new directions for theorizing and studying entrepreneurial ecosystems guided by a critical perspective of social capital (i.e., arriving from several intellectual traditions including political economy, intersectionality, critical race theory, and feminisms). In doing so, the paper offers insights around how continued structural and relational inequalities based on gender, race and/or immigrant status within the domain of entrepreneurship can be brought to the forefront of ecosystem frameworks. Doing so produces new approaches to the conceptualization and study of entrepreneurial ecosystems as more than sites of economic activity between and among actors, but rather it allows for consideration of how being differentially embedded in social structures matters for entrepreneurship. Differences in social structures within ecosystems reflect broader societal patterns and analyzing them can yield insights about the configuration of institutions. To understand the complexity of how different institutional configurations may lead to different forms of entrepreneurial ecosystems, it is necessary to have different conceptual starting points on social capital (informal) and exchange relationships (formal) as foundational aspects of entrepreneurial activities. Consequently, the paper provides these new analytic starting points, thus providing better explanatory and empirical power to demonstrate how and why inequalities persist in entrepreneurship.

Citation

Ozkazanc-Pan, B. (2022), "Rethinking Social Capital: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems as Contested Communities", Eberhart, R.N., Lounsbury, M. and Aldrich, H.E. (Ed.) Entrepreneurialism and Society: Consequences and Meanings (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 82), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 69-87. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20220000082004