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This chapter reports a study that investigates the link between rural small firms’ social networks and their market diversification strategies in the context of the Internet.

Telephone interviews were conducted with a random sample of 142 Scottish small rural and urban firm owners in May 2012. The purpose of the telephone interviews was to understand how Internet usage impacted on the social networks and market diversification experiences of small rural firms. Analysis of the categorical data was performed using a variety of established methods.

Internet usage for many small Scottish rural firms was facilitating both their market reach and social networks. In addition, small rural firms’ most important social network contacts are highly correlated to their origin of sales, and this can be either locally or extra-locally based.

A positive relationship between Internet usage, social networks and market reach expansion offers support for further developing and improving the Internet infrastructure of rural communities.

Internet usage emerges as a critical tool for augmenting the social networks of Scottish rural small firms, which in turn helps to extend their market reach activities.

Drawing on social network and information diffusion theories, the authors study the impact of the structural characteristics of a seller’s local social network on her promotion effectiveness in social commerce.

The authors define a local social network as one formed by a focal seller, her directly connected users and all links among these users. Using data from a large social commerce website in China, the authors build econometric models to investigate how the density, grouping and centralization of local social networks affect the number of likes received by products posted by sellers.

Local social networks with low density, grouping and centralization are associated with more likes on sellers’ posted products. The negative effects of grouping and centralization are reduced when density is high.

The paper deepens the understanding of the determinants of social commerce success from a network structure perspective. In particular, it draws attention to the role of sellers’ local social networks, forming a foundation for future research on social commerce.

This paper aims to explore local social value creation by entrepreneurs located in residential neighborhoods, what drives their behavior and the influence of their local social networks therein, both as a direct effect and through fostering local embeddedness.

In-depth interviews are conducted with 18 neighborhood-based entrepreneurs in the Netherlands to explore whether these entrepreneurs are active in local social value creation and the different drivers of their behavior in that regard (personality, organizational, contextual and issue characteristics) in relation to their local social networks. The research neighborhoods are selected based on social cohesion and collective efficacy scores.

Most interviewees are active in social value creation. Personality characteristics are the main drivers of local social value creation. Local social networks have a direct, indirect and moderating effect, but are not prerequisites for local social value creation to occur. Local embeddedness through emotional attachment to the neighborhood also drives local social value creation.

The findings suggest that neighborhood-based entrepreneurship is a source of local social value, indicating the need for additional and large-scale quantitative research on this type of entrepreneurial activity.

The findings of this study can motivate policymakers to promote entrepreneurship in neighborhoods as a means of stimulating bottom-up local social value creation.

This study contributes to the debate on the social value of entrepreneurship and considers the understudied group of neighborhood-based entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the paper offers a conceptual contribution by focusing on the local social networks as a driver of local social value creation.

Researchers have argued that social networks within a community have positive effects on people's behavior in disasters. The Japanese government is testing online SNS at the municipal level with the intention to improve community building, democratic processes, and disaster management. This paper seeks to explore the use of social networking services (SNSs) in government and disaster in Japan.

This study is based on a literature review of social capital, social support, disaster, and social software. Two exploratory case studies of local government SNS in Yatsushiro city, Kumamoto prefecture and Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture provide empirical evidence. Consequently, the role of local SNS for social capital development and disaster is discussed.

Yatsushiro's solution seems to be sustainable, Nagaoka's SNS is in decline. Both have to compete with popular SNS like Mixi and lack critical mass. There are some indications that government‐initiated SNS helps to build social capital and utilize it in times of a disaster.

The paper contributes to the research on eParticipation and Public Management by describing an internet‐based social software application and its embeddedness in the administrative organization. Any conclusions must be tentative, especially as a consequence of the non‐representative number of users and the lack of testing in a disaster.

The paper provides practitioners with two real life case studies on the implementation and use of local SNS in government.

The paper offers theoretical and practical insights into the use of social software in government. Moreover, it connects current trends in government 2.0 to disaster research.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how some born global firms can leverage the rich social capital in their local (home country) horizontal network for accelerated international market entry and growth. Horizontal networks warrant separate attention from their vertical counterparts, which, along with those focussed on external international contexts, dominate most network studies in the realm of born global research.

The study utilises a multi-level qualitative approach in the study of a multi-firm population of animators in Ireland that, due to the small domestic market for their product, needed to pursue global customers from inception. The case study domain was purposely selected as a critical exemplar of a local horizontal network operating in a highly globalised industry. The authors collected data through in-depth interviews with 16 company founders. This primary interview data were complemented by interviews with staff at the apposite industry association and triangulated with secondary data on the local and global industry conditions, members’ international successes and awards.

The results demonstrate how active membership of a local horizontal network can be leveraged for the acquisition of international market knowledge and customers for born global ventures. This arises from the sharing of collective market knowledge and communal global customer information within the network to mutual benefit.

Although limited by the specific conditions in this highly globalised, non-competitive industry context, this study is unique in that it finds that cooperative interpersonal and inter-firm relationships embedded in a local horizontal social network, and mediated in part by an institutional support actor, emerge as important levers for a born global’s accelerated acquisition of foreign market knowledge and of global customers.

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging entrepreneurship research that deals with resilience by examining how embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks influences proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience.

Three theoretical propositions are developed on the basis of the existing literature. These propositions are assisted with brief empirical illustrations of grassroots innovations from the context of agri-food systems.

Embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks enables proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience. Social-cultural embeddedness in place facilitates access to local resources and legitimacy, and creation of social value in the community. Ecological embeddedness in place facilitates spotting and leveraging of environmental feedbacks and creation of ecological value. Embeddedness in trans-local grassroots networks provides entrepreneurs with unique resources, including globally transferable knowledge about sustainability challenges and practical solutions to these challenges. As result, entrepreneurship for resilience is explained as an embedding process. Embedding means attuning of practices to local places, as well as making global resources, including knowledge obtained in grassroots networks, work in local settings.

Researchers should continue developing the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

The objective of resilience and due respect to local environment may entail a need to consider appropriate resourcing practices and organisational models.

The critical roles of place-based practices for resilience deserve more recognition in today’s globalised world.

The specific importance of the ecological dimension of embeddedness in place is emphasised. Moreover, by combining entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation literatures, which have talked past each other to date, this paper shows how local and global resources are leveraged throughout the embedding process. Thereby, it opens unexplored research avenues within the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of social capital and bridging networks on entrepreneurial activity in three different regions in Sweden.

The empirical base of the paper comprises 120 in‐depth interviews with entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in three municipalities in Sweden, statistical data from Statistics Sweden and a large postal survey conducted by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprises.

The bridging networks between local civil servants and local politicians on the one hand and entrepreneurs on the other are pivotal for the development of an entrepreneurial community.

Despite the same rational‐legal framework, this paper shows how the cognitive dimension of social capital influences the level of entrepreneurship in three municipalities. The importance of bridging networks is also highlighted.

An open channel of communication between politicians and entrepreneurs allows the former to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the latter. By widening the network, more actors are involved in local and regional development, thereby raising the level of competence and resources.

Using three different sets of data, this paper offers a deeper understanding into the complex nature of bridging networks between politics and business.

The purpose of this paper is to find theoretical and practical linkages between social capital, network and community participation. The study examines the role of popular social capital and its forms in shaping community participation under the influence of socioeconomic status of individuals.

The paper uses household survey data (N = 135) from select north Indian villages to assess the role of social capital and individuals’ networks (measured through their network size) in participation. The participation is measured in terms of attendance and vocal participation.

The study finds significant evidence that the networks do not play a uniform role in collective participation. The elitist form of social capital exists in the community which can leverage the networks to their benefit, whereas many people, despite large network size, cannot actively participate. Social capital and networks are not entirely conducive for collective participation and favours a few in the community. Additionally, networks do facilitate information flow but do not help in achieving active engagement. Hence, the peer effect is not truly reflected in vocal participation all the time, especially in local governance context.

The conclusion of the study is based on small sample size from seven villages. Nonetheless, in light of the supporting literature available, it provides useful insights and triggers important questions that need microscopic analysis under the macroscopic umbrella of social capital.

On policy fronts, takeaway from this paper can be used for policy and law formulation for lower strata of the society such as labour law formulation and labour behavioural practices in community participation.

The research findings can be utilized for the emerging applications of social networks in understanding local governance and community engagement in developing societies.

This research has used a novel field experiment conducted by one of the authors himself. The empirical assessment of social capital and networks in local governance can be replicated elsewhere to study participation in other societies as well. In terms of policy, the research underscores the need of using social capital notion while assessing the community engagement in local governance.

Diffusion studies investigate the propagation of behavior, attitudes, or beliefs across a networked population. Some behavior is binary, e.g., whether or not to install solar panels, while other behavior is continuous, e.g., wastefulness with plastic. Similarly, attitudes and beliefs often allow nuance, but can become practically binary in polarized environments. We argue that this property of behavior and attitudes – whether they are binary or continuous – should critically affect whether a population becomes homogenous in its adoption of that behavior. Models show that only continuous behavior converges across a network. Specifically, binary behavior allows local convergence, as multiple states can be local majorities. Continuous behavior becomes uniform across the network through a logic of communicating vessels. We present a model comparing the diffusion of both types of behavior and report on a laboratory experiment that tests it. In the model, actors have to distribute an investment over two options, while a majority receives information that points to the optimal option and a minority receives misguided information that points toward the other option. We predict that when adjacent persons receive misguided information this can hinder convergence toward optimal investment behavior in small networked groups, especially when subjects cannot split their investment, i.e., binary choice. Results falsify our theoretical predictions: Although investment decisions are significantly negatively affected by local majorities only in the binary condition, this difference with the continuous condition is not itself significant. Binary and continuous behavior therefore achieve comparable incidences of optimal investment in the experiment. The failure of the theoretical predictions appears due to a substantial level of error in decision-making, which prevents local majorities from locking in on a suboptimal behavior.

Drawing from resource-based theorising, the concept of network embeddedness and a process perspective on entrepreneurship, this paper establishes a conceptual framework to explain a multi-level and multi-locational network embeddedness of creative entrepreneurs in non-urban places. It challenges stylised facts about creative entrepreneurship as a predominantly urban phenomenon.

Based upon the conceptual framework for creative entrepreneurship in a non-urban place, an illustrative case study of small-scale creative-design entrepreneurs on the Lofoten Islands in Norway (2019) is utilised to discuss the framework.

The conceptual paper derives a fine-grained understanding about how creative entrepreneurship emerges and develops in non-urban places and contributes to a better understanding of how such places can nurture such entrepreneurship through multiple network embeddedness and resource-exchange configurations.

The article will enable further empirical research that tests, validates and, if necessary, refines the framework established.

Creative entrepreneurs should use various resource-exchange combinations with diverse networks to become locally embedded in non-urban places. Public-policy managers need to be aware of this variety that may exist with the network embeddedness of such entrepreneurs to support them and develop the location through resource provisions.

The paper uses an original conceptual framework.