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Local communities are faced with increasing responsibilities to provide for their own well-being and development. With fewer resources, communities need more successful ways of uniting people and resources. Entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) is a necessary ingredient for successfully linking physical resources and leadership for community development. ESI includes three elements: symbolic diversity, resource mobilization, and quality of networks. Instead of fostering perverse conflict or superficial harmony, symbolic diversity inspires communities to engage in constructive controversy to arrive at workable community decisions by focusing on community processes, depersonalization of politics, and broadening of community boundaries. Resource mobilization involves generating some surplus within the community beyond basic subsistence with relative equity in resource and risk distribution, investment by residents of their own private capital locally, and collective investment in the community (willingness of residents to tax themselves). Quality networks include establishing linkages with others in similar circumstances and developing vertical networks to provide diverse sources—both within and outside the community—of experience and knowledge.

A community embeddedness perspective hypothesizes that nonmetropolitan localities high on entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) are more successful at implementing economic development projects than those lacking ESI. ESI is a format for converting social capital into organizational forms that facilitate collective action. Logistic regression revealed that localities with projects were more likely to have an unbiased newspaper, multiple contributions by financial institutions to community projects, and more external linkages. Project communities place more emphasis'on citizen involvement through civic organizations than through local government. Community-based patterns of interactions and organization are associated with successful collective economic development action.Building on ideas about community embeddedness and collective action, this article addresses the relationship between entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) and economic development. The central hypothesis is that communities and counties with more ESI are more likely to have successfully implemented a recent economic development project than localities lacking in ESI. The analysis is based upon a national random sample of nonmetropolitan places and counties.The concept of entrepreneurial social infrastructure was developed by the senior researchers] in order to better understand why some communities remain economically vital while others do not. Location factors (John Batie, and Norris 1988) and theories of leadership have not provided adequate explanations of community vitality. For instance, one careful evaluation of leadership training programs in Montana and Pennsylvania, using a quasi-experimental design, showed an increase in organizational membership and leadership roles for program graduates compared to a matched sample of nonparticipants in such programs (Cook, Howell, and Weir 1985). However, we found no studies that