Entrepreneurship as networking: Mechanisms, dynamics, practices, and strategies

This book presents entrepreneurship as networking as a perspective. Persistent problems around the dominant “individual-opportunity” approach in the entrepreneurship field motivated the authors to focus on the social-interactive aspects and action orientation of entrepreneurship. The work promises to address the challenge of providing a more integrated account in which the entrepreneur’s agency is combined with a greater emphasis on the social environment. The importance of social relations and the associated interactions between entrepreneurs and their environment give insight into key entrepreneurial processes. The authors address the guiding questions of what a viable network is for (nascent) entrepreneurs and how networking activities affect their entrepreneurial endeavors. Therefore, they first create a synthesis of key network mechanisms and networking dynamics. This allows them (a) to shed new light on the origins of opportunities and improve understanding of how entrepreneurs access resources and subsequently mobilize and deploy them, and (b) to explain how entrepreneurs build legitimacy, facilitating them to act on perceived new combinations and thereby exploit their potential. Thus, this book highlights how networking is a central constitutive force in entrepreneurship. Previous work showed how networks can or will lead to entrepreneurial action as a facilitator. Going one step further, the authors posit that networking is entrepreneurial action, and entrepreneurial action is networking, thereby opening an entirely new research agenda.