Social Relationships: The Secret Ingredient of Synergistic Venture Cooperation

Abstract

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

The dark side of social relationships – the context of the video game industry

“…Our systematic literature review [Czernek-Marszałek et al, 2023] confirms the gap regarding the negative effects of the exploitation of social relationships in the creative industries, including SRs maintained by VGDs. However, given not only the broader context of the creative industries, but also the specificity of project-and team-based product-development processes, as well as the characteristics of the VGI, it is possible to consider several aspects of the potential negative influence of social relationships on VGDs.…”

“…Second, taking the external perspective on SRs linking the development studio with other members of VGI, the negative effects may take the form of opportunistic behavior (e.g., leading to buying up employees, disclosure of confidential information) or disruption of business cooperation and/or coopetition. Therefore, on the ground of social relationships which cannot be isolated from business activity [Granovetter, 1985], it is needed to try to keep the right balance between different types of relationships -i.e., the so-called weak ties [which may be very valuable - Czernek-Marszałek et al, 2023] and strong ties, which may provide the negative results recognized in our study.…”

Effect of Entrepreneurial Networking Practice on Performance of Small and Medium Agro Based Youth Enterprises in Kenya

“…A strong professional network can help you achieve things that you would never accomplish on your own, from solutions to seemingly impossible problems, to word of mouth recommendations that grow your customer base, (Fosstenløkken et al, 2023). Additionally, businesses and business owners are embedded in a wide range of social relationships ranging from formal inter-organizational networks to informal networks such as friendships and family ties, all of which affect decision making and business performance (Czernek-Marszałek et al, 2023). More importantly, social networks stimulate business growth by reducing transaction costs, creating business opportunities, and generating knowledge spillovers (Wanambisi, 2022) and also network orientation and relationships are generally found to strengthen the relationship between entrepreneurial practice and enterprise performance (Van Noordwyk, 2023).…”

It’s not just “who” you know, but “how” you know them: how social and commercial relationships differentially influence customer discounts

“…In marketing contexts, consumers frequently engage in relationships with firms to facilitate economic exchanges, characteristic of instrumental relationships, which individuals enter into to obtain outcomes external to the relationships themselves (e.g. Price and Arnould, 1999;Grayson, 2007;Varman and Costa, 2008;Czernek-Marszałek et al, 2023). Instrumental relationships focus primarily on the material benefits sought by the parties involved.…”

“…In contrast, relationships that revolve primarily around social and emotional connections, in which parties maintain close relationships mainly for the sake of the relationship itself, are categorized as expressive relationships (e.g. Lin et al, 1981;Blocker et al, 2012;Czernek-Marszałek et al, 2023). As noted, consumers' use of social relationships, in which they engage in exchanges involving members of their social circles working for firms, typically involve these types of expressive relationships.…”