The social capital of nascent entrepreneurs: A qualitative case study design

Over the last several decades, due to the disruptive technological changes and its global economic effects, there are new potentiality and constraints for organizations. Despite being as an oldest economic movement, with these evolutionary changes, governments, public and private organizations begin to pay more attention to the issue of entrepreneurship and its dynamics. Entrepreneurs not only have positive effects on economic growth and reducing unemployment but also stimulate technological improvement and innovations. Emerging a business is a proceess that requires obtaining divergent resources and managing them according to need and demands. According to the past investigations, the success rate of wishful business founders in creating new organizations is only about fifty percent. The network theory of social capital gives an explanation for how and why the social entrepreneurial network influence the performance related variables that have positive contributions to the survive and growth of ventures. Social capital is defined as the current and potential values that rely on the social network of individuals. According to social capital theory, the social network of an entrepreneur has several contributions on entrepreneurial process. Entrepreneur is defined as a person who recognizes opportunities as a business idea and takes actions actively to convert this solution into commercial product with a desire to own a firm. The most debated issue on this topic is strength of ties and the contributions of strong and weak ties. Although most studies emphasize the positive effects of entrepreneur's big size, divergent and strong network characteristic on the likelihood of entrepreneurial success with measuring networking activities quantitatively, such studies lack providing deeper and detailed explanations about the actual dynamics and content of relations and limited for developing conceptual considerations. In entrepreneurship literature, there should be more investigation about how the characteristics of social network changes or differentiates according to different characteristics of entrepreneurs and their startups. In the literature, there is also a call for qualitative research design to develop deeper understanding the evolvement process of social network. The aim of current study is to understand why and how nascent entrepreneurs expand their ties, which types of network contribute positive effect to their entrepreneurial journey, what type of support do they get from their ties and how getting governmental venture capital grants influence the network characteristics of nascent entrepreneurs', networking behaviour and networking activities. The added value of the present thesis comes from exploring the role of governmental financial support program on social capital of NEs. To investigate these variables and to give an answer for how and why questions qualitative case study methods are used. In this study, two types of NEs are from a university incubation center, which is located in a reputable university of Turkey in Istanbul. First group of NEs are comprised of ventures not having governmental financial support and the second group of NEs are comprised of ventures having governmental financial support. The data analyzed using constant comparative technic. The findings of this study indicate that Governmental financial support has an influence on Social Capital developed by NEs. The most important differences are revealed in networking behavior and networking activities between groups. This study addresses an important gap concerning the influence of the governmental financial support program on the development of social capital. This is also a unique area in the literature by examining social networks as a dependent variable.