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Soil quality is in decline in many parts of the world, in part due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Whilst economic instruments and regulations can help incentivise uptake of more sustainable soil management practices, they rarely motivate long-term behavior change when used alone. There has been increasing attention towards the complex social factors that affect uptake of sustainable soil management practices. To understand why some communities try these practices whilst others do not, we undertook a narrative review to understand how social capital influences adoption in developed nations. We found that the four components of social capital – trust, norms, connectedness and power – can all influence the decision of farmers to change their soil management. Specifically, information flows more effectively across trusted, diverse networks where social norms exist to encourage innovation. Uptake is more limited in homogenous, close-knit farming communities that do not have many links with non-farmers and where there is a strong social norm to adhere to the status quo. Power can enhance or inhibit uptake depending on its characteristics. Future research, policy and practice should consider whether a lack of social capital could hinder uptake of new practices and, if so, which aspects of social capital could be developed to increase adoption of sustainable soil management practices. Enabling diverse, collaborative groups (including farmers, advisers and government officials) to work constructively together could help build social capital, where they can co-define, -develop and -enact measures to sustainably manage soils.

The purpose of this paper is to study the way in which family ties influence the entrepreneurial preparedness of the diaspora family business owner.

In-depth interviews were carried out with 15 Cypriot family business owners hosted in various countries. The paper draws on social capital theory and uses an abductive analytical approach.

The findings of this paper illustrate that family ties coming from the family across borders play a significant role for diaspora family business owners’ entrepreneurial preparedness. Hidden values deriving from the interpersonal relationships within the family across borders drive the diaspora family business owners to learn upon self-reflection and become entrepreneurially prepared, led by both urgency and esteem.

This study provides practical implications for the entrepreneurial preparedness of diaspora family business owners and those who wish to become family business owners in a diaspora context.

This study contributes theoretically through the conceptualization of “family across borders social capital” and “diaspora entrepreneurial preparedness”. It also contributes empirically to the fields of diaspora family business, entrepreneurial learning and diaspora entrepreneurship through new knowledge regarding the role of family across borders social capital in the entrepreneurial preparedness of the diaspora family business owner.

The paper aims to analyze the relevance of networking and social capital in promoting the adoption of sustainable innovation, then reinforcing trajectories of multifunctional agriculture. It puts forwards a systemic perspective by focusing on agricultural knowledge and innovation systems. More precisely, we share the idea of “micro agricultural knowledge and innovation systems”, by addressing ambidexterity as engine for boosting sustainable innovation.

Empirical analysis is focused on sustainable innovation adopted by young farmers in Italy and on the mediation effect of ambidextrous relations in performing innovation adoption. Ambidextrous relations are analyzed within at the micro-AKIS level, through the lens of social capital. Relationships between social capital and innovation adoption are statistically measured.

The analysis shows how ambidexterity develops a mediation effect, with a strong impact on the farm's innovative capacity. Actually, our results confirm that ambidextrous relations reveal good performance and stimulate innovation and, consequently, farms' competitiveness, alongside the path of multifunctional agriculture. As a consequence, the relevance of networking activity in adoption of sustainable innovation may address possible policy action with the aim to strengthen ambidexterity and farm's innovativeness.

The paper tries to fill a gap in literature, by focusing on micro-AKIS which are explored through the lens of social capital.

Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mediating effect of the identification of valuable external knowledge on the relationship between the development of inter-organizational ties (structural social capital) and the acquisition of external knowledge.

Using a sample of 87 firms from Spanish biotechnology and pharmaceutics industries, the authors have tested the proposed mediation hypothesis by applying the partial least squares technique to a structural equations model.

The study results show that those firms with stronger, more frequent and closer inter-relationships are able to increase the amount of intentionally acquired knowledge, partly due to the greater level of development of their knowledge identification capability. Thus, firms with a higher capability to recognize the value of the knowledge embedded in their inter-organizational networks will be more likely to design better strategies to acquire and integrate such knowledge into their current knowledge bases for either present or future use.

This research contributes to knowledge management and social capital literature by means of the study of two key determinants of knowledge acquisition – structural social capital and knowledge identification capability – and the explanation of their relationships of mutual influence. The paper thus tries to fill this literature gap and connects the relational perspective of social capital with the knowledge-based view from a strategic point of view.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between an individual's social capital context and entrepreneurship using a multi-level modelling framework.

This paper uses data from 87,007 individual level observations across 428 regions in 37 countries. The data comes from the 2010 and 2016 Life in Transition Surveys. The paper uses a principal component analysis to identify the different dimensions of an individual's social capital context. Subsequently, a multi-level model is employed examining the relationship between the components of an individual's social capital context and entrepreneurship (which is proxied by an individual's attempt to set up a business), whilst controlling for both country and regional effects.

Greater levels of networking, informal connections and tolerance of others have a significant positive relationship with entrepreneurial activity. Trust of institutions and others have a negative relationship with entrepreneurial activity. Regional and country differences are also important for entrepreneurship, demonstrating the importance of the multi-level and social contextual environment for business development.

Firstly, the authors present a broad, but comprehensive social contextual framework incorporating many measures of social capital when examining the importance of social capital for business development. Secondly, the work provides interesting results on the “bright and dark sides of trust” for entrepreneurship, answering calls for improved understandings on the positive and negative relationships between social capital and entrepreneurial activity. Thirdly, the paper extends the burgeoning but limited number of studies that examine the multi-level contextual environment of entrepreneurial activities.

Low-carbon agricultural technology (LAT) extension is a key strategy for the agricultural sector to address climate change. Social capital, which consists of social networks, trust and norms, can play an active LAT extension role. This paper aims to analyze the mechanism of the role of social capital in the process of LAT extension.

Questionnaire data from six counties in Jiangsu, China, were used to measure social capital and analyze its effect on LAT extension using logistic regression. Data from 27 interviews were used to analyze the LAT extension experiences and problems.

LAT is mainly deployed by the government to farmers and distributed among them. In this process, the village officials who form parts of the government’s composition and the villagers play a dual role that facilitates a close link between them and the farmers and ensures LAT integration. However, social norms did not play a significant role in the process.

Farmers’ acceptance of LAT is based solely on the trade-off between local networks’ benefits and trust in local villagers and village officials. LAT-related laws and technical measures, thus are essential to strengthen LAT practices’ authority and incorporate LAT-based agricultural production as the norm of production behavior.

This paper provides an insight into the process and essence of farmers’ acceptance of LAT, which provides theoretical lessons for the LAT extension in China and indeed other developing countries.

This article explores theoretical assumptions regarding negative consequences of social capital in the empirical case of a failed cooperation project, and how these consequences are related to processes involving people, structures and environments.

The article is based on a case study of a cooperation project within municipal labor market services. The methodology followed a theorizing process, where data were collected through ethnographical methods and analyzed in relation to existing concepts from theories describing negative effects of social capital and shadow organizing.

The results highlight how the development of negative social capital in the project can be understood through three relational processes, namely the social dynamics of insulation, homogenization and escalating commitment. The authors conclude that the quality of social capital is conditional upon complex interactions within social structures. Moreover, the results highlight the importance of studying organizing practices outside explicit structures, in order to identify the development of non-canonical practices and their consequences.

Organizing cooperation projects that aim to bridge professional competencies or organizational boundaries have to be attentive toward informal organizing practices which if remaining unrecognized may grow and threaten the original intentions.

The study makes a theoretical contribution by combining a shadow organizing approach with literature on social capital. This combination proves especially useful for analyzing how organizational dynamics can influence the development of social capital into producing negative effects.

The authors investigate the contributions of social capital (SC) dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) in crowdfunding campaigns by comparing the dynamics of agri-food businesses with those of two other sectors – cultural and technological.

The authors develop linear regressions on a proprietary data set of 5,290 projects launched on the Italian platform “Produzionidalbasso.com”, from 2014 to 2020.

The authors’ findings suggest that combining the three social capital dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) has a more substantial overall effect on the number of backers involved in agri-food projects than in cultural and technological projects. Agri-food entrepreneurs effectively mobilize all resources embedded in the SC dimensions and therefore create the conditions to develop new ties that financially support the project.

Agri-food entrepreneurs may benefit from those results improving their funding strategies. Therefore, agri-food entrepreneurs can explore and exploit the instruments available on the CFD platform – video and rewards associated with the campaign – gaining more benefit from the backers involved compared with other project categories.

The study proposes a broader perspective regarding SC that encompasses the proponent, the company and the campaign with three different types of ties: bonding, bridging and linking. These SC dimensions can differently shape diverse sectors and this eclectic configuration can differentiate the effects of SC in crowdfunding campaigns. This study pinpoints how crowdfunding determinants change, based on project categories.

This study aims to build on social capital theory (SCT) and its dimensions by examining the role of social capital in the public procurement process and by identifying related contingencies that may influence procurement performance.

A systematic literature review and a thematic analysis regarding social capital in procurement are conducted. The antecedent–behaviour–consequence (ABC) model is used for illuminating linkages between social capital, contingencies and procurement performance.

The dimensions of social capital are investigated in the procurement process; however, the extent of social capital role can vary between the phases of the process. It is concluded that the contingencies of social dynamics are linked with social capital and may influence the outcomes and performance of the procurement process.

Social capital can ease interactions between public buyers and private suppliers by contributing to effective tendering, improving social interaction in negotiations and balancing rigidity in contract management, supporting the interests of both parties. The provided framework helps decision makers to comprehend the social dynamics in public procurement.

Improving social dynamics and solutions in public procurement.

This study extends social capital research in the field of public procurement and creates a framework connecting social capital and prevailing contingency factors to procurement process performance.