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We conceptualize corporate social capital within the context of Chinese guanxi culture. We assert that the formation and mobilization of corporate social capital are culturally and institutionally contextualized. Building upon a relational approach to corporate performance, we examine culture-sensitive properties of Chinese guanxi and compare guanxi social capital with non-guanxi social capital. We then explain why guanxi-based corporate social capital is of growing significance to the Chinese transitional economy in an era of increasing market competition and institutional uncertainty. We conclude by proposing a research agenda about the roles that guanxi-based corporate social capital plays for boosting corporate performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of corporate social capital and local embeddedness on perceived business performance of Chinese enterprises operating overseas, whose recent growth resulted from the Belt and Road Initiative.

This study reports the results of a sample of 83 Shaanxi outward foreign direct investment (FDI) firms operating in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. In-depth interviews with a few sampled firms are used to develop the survey questionnaire and help interpret the results of statistical analysis.

This study proposes two hypotheses and both are supported by the data. First, corporate social capital is a three-dimensional concept, covering governmental, market and personal sources with each source making an equal, positive effect on perceived overseas performance of the surveyed firms. Second, these firms do better when having developed a higher degree of local embeddedness, a measure on local channels used to obtain information and mobilize resources. While local embeddedness indeed mediates some effect of corporate social capital, both variables have shown direct impact on performance.

Reported findings are from a small sample of 83 firms in an inland Chinese province, and business performance is measured by subjective evaluation rather than economic output.

The practical implication is that a Chinese FDI firm is expected to maintain all three relational channels – governmental, market and interpersonal – because the firm can gain different kinds of information and resources from these sources and each channel is necessary and equally important for the firm’s development. Importantly, it needs a different strategy to maintain and best use each channel. For the Belt and Road Initiative to be effective, China must establish platforms through which enterprises can strengthen and reconfigure their corporate social capital, as well as to cultivate and sustain their local networks in foreign destinations.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of top management’s social capital – focusing on specific components of social capital – in shaping a company’s marketing capabilities. In addition, the study was designed to determine the extent to which cosmopolitanism as a top management’s characteristic serves as a moderator that allows top management’s social capital to influence corporate marketing capabilities.

This study’s sample comprised small- and medium-sized companies in Korea and China. After excluding insincere responses, 636 questionnaires (329 from Koreans, 307 from Chinese) were used for the analysis. A mediated hierarchical regression analysis was performed to verify the hypothesis.

This study proposed the hypothesis that top management’s social capital would have positive effects on corporate marketing capabilities: pricing strategies, product development, distribution strategies and marketing communications. While managerial tie utilization and solidarity were revealed to have positive effects on corporate marketing capabilities, trust did not show statistically significant effects.

This study is subject to several limitations. First, it has not fully addressed various foundational concepts or factors that comprise or facilitate the building of social capital. In addition to trust and the sharing of core values and knowledge among organizational members, there may be other factors involved, so systematic studies should be conducted using a model that can review the roles of various explanatory variables that constitute social capital.

This study’s empirical results contribute valuable data to the literature, as it was based on a survey conducted with actual Korean and Chinese top managers. In addition, the study’s findings are likely to suggest a valuable direction for evaluating corporate marketing strategies and business performance. The study identified powerful effects of top management’s social capital on corporate marketing strategies. Therefore, greater investments should be made to build the top management’s social capital, so that the corporate capacity for marketing strategies will be able to produce maximum effects.

The results of this study suggest the following additional points. A company with a high level of cosmopolitan orientation may have excellent strategies for competing on overseas markets. Companies targeting global markets should leverage accumulated top management’s social capital to discover overseas business opportunities and acquire knowledge of overseas markets. When the corporate executives of companies that attempt to make inroads into overseas markets have such a cosmopolitan orientation and actively seek and seize overseas market opportunities, they are more likely to avoid path dependency, following domestic business activities and become successful in those global markets.

The present study segmented social capital into sub-factors, thereby identifying their relationships with the behavioral outputs of corporate executives, such as business practice processes, marketing capabilities and business performance. Based on the findings of this study, top management’s social capital should enable companies to consolidate corporate business practice capabilities and, eventually, to be seen as closely associated with business performance and the essential qualities and characteristics of top managers.

The main goal of this study is to analyze the influence of social capital and corporate ethics on social progress. A theoretical model is proposed, and the hypotheses were tested on a sample of 32 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries between 2011 and 2018 that includes data from the Social Progress Imperative non-profit organization as well as from the World Economic Forum database (Global Competitiveness Reports). The results indicate that, although both social capital and corporate ethics have a direct influence on social progress, social capital also influences corporate ethics so that the latter acts as a mediating variable between social capital and social progress.

This study examines the influence of access to finance and social capital on the improvement of the corporate performance of non-listed firms of Southeast Asian countries. Furthermore, this paper also explores the mediating role of firms' access to finance between the association of social capital and the improvement of corporate performance.

This study utilizes the Bank Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey from 2015 to 2017. Specifically, the survey was administered by the World Bank. Data were analyzed using structural modeling in Smart-PLS.

The findings show that firms' access to finance and social capital significantly influences the improvement of corporate performance. Additionally, the study’s analysis further reports the mediating role of firms' access to finance between the association of social capital and the improvement of corporate performance.

This study has implications for governments, regulators and policymakers for enhancing access to finance and social capital, and improving corporate performance.

This paper establishes the importance of firms' access to finance and social capital for improving firms' overall performance in the broader context of Southeast Asia.

The paper investigates how the interplay of women-specific human and social capital factors with ownership structure impacts her chances to get director level appointment in the light of recent amendments to the Indian statute.

The strength of the study lies in fitting a logistic regression model to the unique hand collected data on women director characteristics from 100 large listed Indian firms.

Counter intuitive findings reveal negative effects of social capital on appointment of independent women directors. This relationship gets reversed when social capital is moderated by ownership structure.

Companies may be influenced to take into cognizance the underlying gender biases prevailing in the highest echelons of management and employ un-gendered fair selection practices for board level appointments in order to progress towards gender balanced corporate boards.

The paper is a first of its kind that combines aspects of human capital and ownership structure using Indian data. By developing several new proxy variables to enrich the construct of social capital it contributes to the corporate governance literature and lastly, through main and interaction effects, the paper offers a deeper understanding about the impact of endogenous factors of corporate boards on women's representation at leadership levels in India.

In view of the increasing importance of creating values that require shared societal responsibilities to be borne by not just firms but customers as well, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether customers’ social capital plays a role in creating shared values for South Korean firms directly or indirectly through social identity and corporate authenticity.

To understand the effects of social capital on value co-creation, the authors conducted a face-to-face questionnaire survey with a selected group of 400 adult respondents aged more than 20 years. To verify precision in wording and sentence structure and the validity of questions in reflecting the study objective, the authors conducted a pretest on 40 respondents before administering the main survey. Ultimately, 50 questionnaires considered inappropriate and with inconsistent response patterns were discarded, leaving 350 questionnaires for the statistical analysis.

This research adopts the consumer-centric as well as societal perspectives to conceptualize value co-creation behavior, and tests the moderating roles of psychometric measures of self-monitoring and corporate trust. Next, the research confirms whether social identity and perceived corporate authenticity mediate the relationship between social capital and value co-creation.

The study results shed new insights into the societal, psychological and normative aspects of value co-creation.

A large and growing literature examines the explicit social responsibility practices of companies. Yet corporations’ greatest consequences for social welfare arguably occur through indirect processes that shape the social fabric that sustains generosity and mutual support within communities. Based on this logic, we theorize and test a model that suggests two pathways by which large corporations affect community philanthropy: (1) through direct engagement in community philanthropy and (2) by indirectly influencing the efficacy of community social capital, defined as the relationships among community members that facilitate social support and maintenance of social welfare. Our analysis of United Way contributions in 136 US cities over the 46 years from 1952 to 1997 supports our model. We find that the presence of corporations weakens the contributions of both elite and working-class social capital on community philanthropy. Our findings thus contribute to a novel view of corporate social responsibility based on how corporations influence the social capital of the communities in which they are embedded.

This paper aims to conceptualize corporate reference management as a strategic signaling activity in business networks. While research has extensively outlined how firms develop and maintain social capital through business-to-business (B2B) relationships, less is known about how they signal their participation in business networks to develop this social capital. Therefore, this paper conceptualizes B2B references, in particular corporate online references (COR), as a tool through which firms “borrow” attractiveness from their business network. Through the lens of structural social capital theory, COR is shown to capture advantages related to interconnectedness between firms.

The paper reports on a two-step qualitative and quantitative research design. First, the authors undertook a qualitative study that reports on the COR practices of senior business managers. A quantitative study then uses social network analysis (SNA) to audit a digital business network comprising 1,098 firms in a metropolitan area of the UK, referencing to each other through their corporate websites using COR.

The analyses find that COR practices contribute to building structural social capital in networks through strategic signaling. Firms do so by managing B2B references to craft strategic signals, using five steps: requesting, granting, curating, coding and decoding references. While the existing literature on business marketing portrays reference management as a routine and operational management practice, this investigation conceptualizes reference management, in particular COR, as a strategic activity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use SNA to represent B2B references in the form of COR as a network, which overlaps with (but is not entirely identical to) the business network. Further, the study re-conceptualizes reference management as a strategic signaling activity that leverages the firm’s participation in business networks to build structural social capital by borrowing attractiveness of prestigious business partners that leverages existing structural social capital. Finally, the paper coins and conceptualizes COR as an exemplar of referencing management and offers propositions for further research.

This paper studies the role of inter-firm supply chain social capital and intra-firm social capital in enabling Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE), and also investigates the moderating and mediating effect of absorptive capacity.

A correlational descriptive survey research is employed for 200 firms; adopting a 13-item Likert scale obtained from Wang and Li (2016) for measuring inter-firm social capital, and an eight item Likert scale for measuring absorptive capacity. This is in addition to a nine item Likert scale obtained from De Clercq et al. (2013) to measure the intra-firm social capital, and a nine item semantic differential scale developed by Covin and Slevin (1989) for measuring the level of corporate entrepreneurship. Statistical analysis packages SPSS V.24 and AMOS V.24 were used.

Results provide evidence that structural supply chain social capital has an effect on corporate entrepreneurship; mediated by potential absorptive capacity. Additionally, the effect of relational supply chain social capital on corporate entrepreneurship is fully mediated by potential absorptive capacity. Furthermore, the effect of cognitive supply chain social capital on corporate entrepreneurship is fully mediated by potential absorptive capacity. On the other hand, results show that both intra-firm social capital and realized absorptive capacity moderate the relationship between potential absorptive capacity and corporate entrepreneurship.

The convenience sampling technique increases the probability of selection bias. In addition, the research focused on two aspects of intra-firm social capital, namely relational and cognitive dimensions, and overlooked the structural dimension of social capital.

Providing managers with insights about the critical role of developing social capital among supply chain partners to facilitate the transfer and exchange of crucial knowledge necessary for product development and innovation. This is in addition to the need to capitalize on intra-collaborations and cross-functional routines to facilitate CE.

This study provides a required extension to the previous literature, which has not empirically modeled the role of potential absorptive capacity as means by which supply chain social capital dimensions enable CE. Also, the research identifies contingency factors that enable the effect of potential absorptive capacity on CE; namely intra-firm social capital and realized absorptive capacity.