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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.

In this essay, we argue that understanding of meaning in relation to organizational networks warrants a more prominent place in organizational theorizing, because it fulfils a distinct role in the emergence and evolution of networks. Whereas prior studies have tended to address network structures or narrative structures, we suggest that organizational processes might be better understood when addressing the role of meaning and network structures simultaneously. We explain the implications of our argument in an online context, given the growing significance of digitally enabled networks on organizational sociality, and draw on examples in the context of organizational knowledge sharing to support our argument. We conclude by introducing a communication flow model to support the further development of research on organizational meaning networks.

The argument that applications of social network research tools and theories to stakeholder research will advance our understanding of how organizations should and do interact with their stakeholders and how stakeholders influence organizations has been well known for over 15 years. However, the integration of social network analysis and stakeholder research has been limited to date. To motivate stakeholder network research, I illustrate the similarities and complementarities between these research streams, arguing that the social network perspective tackles weaknesses in stakeholder models supporting the creation of more fruitful models of organization–stakeholder environments. I illustrate how stakeholder power and legitimacy, and focal organization obligations can be better modeled theoretically and measured empirically using social network concepts and techniques.

Latinos in the United States have poor outcomes for periodontal and dental health. However, a detailed description of the mechanisms driving these patterns has only recently started to be addressed in the literature. In the current study, we explore relationships between individual-level characteristics of Mexican immigrants, properties of their networks, and experiences of dental problems. Specifically, using data from an urban community of Mexican immigrants to the American Midwest (n = 332), this study examines how characteristics of oral health matters (OHM) discussion networks and individual-level sociodemographic characteristics are associated with four adverse oral health outcomes. The results provide strong support for relationships between immigrants’ network characteristics and dental problems. We find that people with more dental problems talk about these issues more frequently with network ties. Conversely, stronger relationships with OHM discussion networks, as measured by mean closeness, are predictive of fewer dental problems. In addition, we identify a link between perceptions of alters’ knowledge about teeth, mouth, and gums and egos reporting better oral health outcomes. The observed patterns are suggestive of mechanisms of social influence that are well replicated in the social, medical, and public health literatures, but that have seldom been empirically tested in the domain of oral health. Though preliminary, our findings suggest a potential explanatory role for social networks in some of the most important questions and problems in oral health disparities research. In all, our findings suggest that social network members are active participants in the management and response to oral health problems in this immigrant group and should be considered an important factor in the development and course of diseases.

Old boy networks are exclusive elite networks of white males that afford inside information, facilitate advancement, and provide support to each other. Understanding old boy networks is important because it represents a culturally specific form of cronyism that has significant negative consequences for international business. As a corrective to more optimistic scholarship on the benefits of social networks in organizations – and in line with critical assessments of other network phenomena, such as guanxi – we explore the generic social processes that give rise to old boy networks in society using Social Closure Theory and consider the consequences of old boy networks in organizations through the lens of Relational Inequality Theory. Specifically, we highlight research on network membership and gender, race, and class inequality in hiring, socialization, and assessment. We conclude by discussing the implications of old boy networks for international business.

The study examines how late adolescents use the resources embedded in their social network to obtain the information and support they need to do their homework. A particular attention is paid to how social network sites (SNSs) are used and perceived by late adolescents for academic help seeking.

This qualitative study uses in-depth interviewing and critical incident technique. An egocentric approach to Social Network Analysis is also employed to examine the core social network of each participant.

Most adolescents had a solid personal social network but did not always fully take advantage of the resources embedded in it for schoolwork. Availability was the most important criteria for deciding who to approach. SNSs were often used to obtain the help they needed, although phone calls and in-person visits were considered more efficient in certain situations.

This study draws on a small purposive sample that may limit generalization. This research contributes to our understanding of the resources late adolescents have access to within their core social network, the way they take advantage (or not) of these resources for schoolwork, and the role SNSs play in the process. Findings have implications for services that educators and school librarians should provide to support the educational needs of late adolescents.

This study contributes more generally to our understanding of late adolescents’ use of people as primary sources of information to complete school-related homework.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the notion of thin crossing points from a social network perspective and to outline the concrete networking strategies that enable salespeople to foster mutually valuable resource exchange (i.e. to thin crossing points) across a selling ecosystem.

The authors integrate extant theoretical perspectives to advance a conceptual framework of sales-related networking across three key actors in a selling ecosystem: intraorganizational selling actors and actors in customers and external partner organizations.

Thin crossing points are defined as figurative transaction points at the boundary between organizations or organizational subunits at which actors engage in mutually valuable resource exchange in the process of value cocreation. To thin crossing points with key ecosystem actors, salespeople must adapt networking strategies considering the time and trust constraints inherent in a network relationship. Such constraints inform the most advantageous network centralities (degree, eigenvector and betweenness) and actions to impact key network properties (tie strength, contact diversity) that enable salespeople to efficiently develop social capital and thus to optimally thin crossing points across a selling ecosystem.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first social network-based exploration of salespeople’s role in thinning crossing points with key ecosystem actors. It advances a novel conceptual framework of sales-related networking strategies that foster social capital development and optimally thin crossing points across a selling ecosystem.

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.